Valve closed a working Steam Frame video decode patch as a duplicate of its own item
Valve closed an outside developer's working patch for Steam Frame hardware video decoding on October 12, as a duplicate of a job its own engineer had put on the tracker 12 days earlier. The item it pointed at, "Lepton: let Android apps use the Iris hardware video decoder (MediaCodec)", was opened by Valve engineer Philippa Day on September 30 at 16:18 UTC and is still open.
Lepton is the container Steam uses to run Android titles on a Steam Frame. Image: Valve Image: Valve
The patch came from a developer evaluating hardware video playback for a video player on the headset. Their report says the decoder node /dev/video-dec0 "is accessible on the SteamOS host but is not exposed inside the stock Lepton container we tested", which stops an Android app that talks to V4L2 directly from using it at all.
So they exposed it themselves, as an opt-in passthrough that defaults to off, and tested what came out. Inside that modified container they "confirmed hardware decoding of the following formats": HEVC Main at 8-bit and HEVC Main10 at 10-bit.
Valve opened the item itself on September 30
Valve's reply was two lines long: the issue "is already being tracked" at the Lepton work item, "Closing as a duplicate". Valve has put nothing in that item beyond its title, with no description, no assignee and no target date, and its two comments are not readable without a login. It had three upvotes when checked on October 14.
What is established is that a Valve engineer filed the work on September 30 and that it is still open. What Valve intends to do about it is not public.
Lepton is being worked on in the meantime. Valve merged three changes into the public repository in October, the most recent on October 14, covering log rotation, a container shutdown that could loop forever, and the system image used in its own tests.
Valve built Lepton for games, and says so
Valve's README says Lepton "is intended to help game developers bring their VR Android games to the Steam Frame", and that "other usecases are possible, but were not the focus of development and may lack polish". It also says Lepton "disables various Android services that are not required to run games possibly breaking compatibility with some applications".
A video player is one of those other use cases, and it is the second video app this month to hit the same limit. Whirligig's Lepton build for the Frame shipped on October 8 without GPU video decoding, from the app developer's side of the same wall.
Valve open-sourced Lepton in September, which is why any of this is visible at all: the request, the close, the work item and its date are all on Valve's own hosts.
HEVC decode in hardware works on a Steam Frame, on a container one developer rebuilt to allow it. The build Steam ships does not expose it.
