We’ve been trying to log video from our robot vehicle to disk
under QNX. We’ve lost a week on this so far due to
QNX defects.
-
Media Player is badly broken. It won’t even play
the official MPEG 1 test files properly. It
skips to the last frame. Apparently nobody ever
tested it on a video-only file, and it’s using
the audio track to time the video file. -
A QNX employee suggested using “mmplay”. That’s
worse. It won’t play any video files. Maybe
it insists we have to have audio hardware to play
a video file, or it wants video hardware with
overlay capabiilty. But the messages that
come out don’t explicitly say that. Often it
just core dumps. (Of course, QNX doesn’t fully support
any video hardware we have. Most of our machines
have Via S3 Savage video chipsets, and QNX doesn’t
support any versions of that in current production.
Only obsolete hardware of that family is supported.
Like everybody else, we’re running in VESA mode.
Despite having purchased hardware for QNX which appeared, from
the supported hardware list, to be supported.) -
We’ve tried to port the free “ffmpeg” libraries to QNX.
These libraries are supposedly used by shipping QNX
applications and have supposedly been ported to QNX.
But the changes for QNX hae not been put back into the
publicly available sources.
“libavcodec” and “libavformat” build, but the output
has artifacts. I’ve tried to build the test suite
for “ffmpeg”, but that wants “md5sum”, which is
missing from QNX. -
Trying to build the “GNU core utilities” to make “md5sum”
fails under QNX because “configure” won’t run. It prints
“configure: error: could not determine
how to read list of mounted filesystems”. So we can’t
build “md5sum”. So we can’t build the tests for
the codecs. So we can’t diagnose the codec problem.
None of which we should have to be doing in the
first place.
A serious problem with QSSL is that it relies on free software tools,
but doesn’t do the work to make sure they work right.
QNX’s so-called “multimedia support” is mostly a front end on free software.
Necessary QNX-related changes required often don’t make it back
into the master sources. So users can’t rely on the open
source community for support. Users can’t simply build
free software for QNX using publicly available sources.
Support, in the form of timely fixes from QSSL, is of course
nonexistent. We have never received any delivered fix
for any reported defect in QNX whatsoever. Even for
major defects confirmed by multiple other users.
Working around defects like this in QNX has cost us two
to three months over the last year. Time we didn’t have.
John Nagle
Team Overbot
