XBMC Project Implements AMD XvBA Interface

[AnonymousCoward]

Ok, here's how I read your post, in a nutshell: "I agree BUT *venom for the rest of the post*"

Also I find that what you claim as facts is actually really subjective, being a personal interpretation of AMD's internal actions based on public ones, pitted against one's own short-term expectations.

Short-term expectations? Is this a joke or what? The whole XvBA saga has been going on for years. That's an eternity in the world of software and electronics. Where its competitors have had working solutions for years AMD screwed up big time with UVD for Linux. There's no defense. Please do yourself a favor and get rid of this ridiculous fanboy attitude.

[PsynoKhi0]

Short-term expectations? Is this a joke or what? The whole XvBA saga has been going on for years. That's an eternity in the world of software and electronics. Where its competitors have had working solutions for years AMD screwed up big time with UVD for Linux. There's no defense. Please do yourself a favor and get rid of this ridiculous fanboy attitude.

Heh... Name calling in a post proving my point. How disingenuous.
So, I could list the improvements to fglrx, the work on the opensource radeon drivers, opencl, the fact that gl output (although not as elegant as GPU-acceleration) was perfectly serviceable till low-end APUs became a larger focus, resource management, legal clearance etc etc etc. but I suppose that I could put my time to better use.

[Guest]

XBMC rocks!

this is awesome! finally out of the box xvba support on xbmc! the acer iconia tab w500 and hp slate are even more tempting now.


XBMC devs rock!

[fritsch]

Shared Surface become more stable

To get back on topic.

We fixed some of the bugs concerning Shared Surfaces and Interlacing. We found out, that the API is not thread safe. So for now we lock every API call against each other. Packages for ppa are currently uploading. The "Experimental" String for Shared Surfaces is already dropped in GIT and will be removed later this day.

https://github.com/FernetMenta/xbmc/commit/998f7aa89895d07639089ff42e8d173de05fef91

[Kano]

Any estimation when xvba will be in mainline?

[fritsch]

Currently xbmc prepares for the Eden release without xvba support. This has priority 1.

There is still a long way to go. Currently we say that xvba part is experimental and needs more testing. The plan is to get mpeg-2 support done and stabilize the other parts which still make problems for users.

After this squash the patches and cleanup the code and try to merge at the appropriate upstream locations. Sorry to not have a concrete date for you.

[Kano]

Well currently you would need an autofallback for h264 to software in cases where xvba fails. does it at least report error status?

[barkas]

Now if the rest of fglrx were usable at all, this would be great news.

[Kano]

I tested that xvba branch now, works really well if you force vsync on and disable "use xvba shared surfaces". I dont get why this is enabled by default when it does not work at all... I found a little packaging issue with the libxvba-dev package (must be all not any), but thats only a minor issue. Well done! Did not think i could use my ati cards collection for something usefull, but maybe i add an ati card again to my htpc. What i dont get with xbmc is only that the win variant can not use bd iso images directly but the linux ones can do - yes i test win sometimes did not build it there however - i only use git on linux. Btw. the weather undergrund plugin seems to have issues with that xvba branch but not with mainline.

[fritsch]

I tested that xvba branch now, works really well if you force vsync on and disable "use xvba shared surfaces". I dont get why this is enabled by default when it does not work at all...

Which version did you use? The latest git from yesterday with the new x11: lock communication to display, connection might be in use by e.g. vdpau patch? The tree is currently waiting for a rebase to get all fixes in, which went into eden beta++. Do you have a chance to test the ppa version? We built a package on 12/24 which is working rather good for a lot of people. Shared Surfaces are on by default, cause we fixed a lot of problems. Remember to switch compiz off in order to get it all working. If you have installed gdb, we are happy for crash / xbmc.log. Just open an issue at github.