The BeagleBone Black could use a VPU (video processing unit)

Top side of a BeagleBone Black

I've been working a bit with the BeagleBone Black (BBB), a $45USD single board computer, for the last couple of months. It's capabilities, relative to its cost, are impressive. Several sites have compared the specs of the BBB and the popular Raspberry Pi (RPi), another powerful and low cost single board computer. You can check out some analysis of the two here.

One important difference between the BBB and the RPi is that the BBB lacks a video processing unit (VPU) to accelerate video playback. A video processing unit helps improve video decoding and/or encoding rates by performing some or all of the specialized operations involved in video processing. Without a VPU or other specialized hardware, a system would have to perform the video processing using the system's core processor, likely a general purpose processor, and at a far slower rate. This RPi and BBB comparison picks up on the video decoding capabilities as a key difference between the two otherwise similar platforms. A lack of vpu means that the BBB will struggle when playing back 720p video, using a large portion of the processor to do so. 1080p decode is out of the question with the BBB. The RPi on the other hand has a VPU called VideoCore that performs hardware video decoding. Many people have reported being able to playback 1080p video on RPi's used for media center systems.

It would be neat if the next version of the BBB had a processor that could either perform 1080p video decode in its general purpose ARM processor, maybe by having multiple processor cores or a higher clock rate, or if it had some hardware to perform the specialized video operations. This hardware might not have to perform as many of the video decoding steps as the VideoCore or other VPU's do, just enough to enable 1080p playback with some comfortable margin of available CPU.

I hope to post some concrete results of video decode performance on the BBB in the near future, along with links to the sample videos so the tests can be easily repeated. If anyone has some good numbers related to BBB video performance I'd appreciate if you could drop me an email or post a comment below.

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