Why I think the DRM and open source debate is nonsense

[bridgman]

Thanks all. In case it helps, I was answering curaga's question which was essentially "where is the advantage if you're not the first to expose video acceleration". My answer was that we weren't trying to compete in the open source space by "opening more stuff than everyone else", just by having good hardware and making sure that we provide good and ongoing support to the open source driver dev community.

I think we will get to AIGLX and video a lot sooner than 12 months, but obviously it depends on how quickly the development community engages. Right now a very small number of X devs are doing all the hard work.

This is really an open source thread and my role is primarily open source so I'll just make quick comments on the fglrx side.

I have mentioned before that our focus for fglrx has historically been workstation users, who generally use a much more tightly constrained set of distros and care most about support on "the major distros that shipped a year ago". We have been gradually ramping up our consumer Linux focus recently, so you should see ongoing improvements there. Getting the Linux driver onto the new OpenGL code base was a huge step forward (even if there were a few missing bits) because it meant that work done for other OSes would also benefit Linux users. That, in turn, frees up a bit more of the Linux dev team's time to work on Linux-specific issues.

Kano, I can ask about 7.1.1 but I imagine the AIGLX testing would have focused on 7.2 and 7.3 xorg releases. Do you see a lot of need to support and maintain new features on the older xorg releases ?

[Svartalf]

Actually there are but they are sold as S3 chips and are very hard t get hold of. I dunno if they have the same level of linux support. www.s3graphics.com

Well... Most players in the low-end very cheap value space seem to be using cheap NVidia or AMD parts instead of S3's stuff. I've not seen a discrete S3 based board in at least a year or more. Of course, I've not been mucking about at a cheap parts wholesaler (throw a rock in Dallas, hit at least 1-3 of them... >;-) ), so I could be missing out on some more testing parts for stuff- food for thought and an excuse to hit some of my old haunts... Other than that possibility, I'm not aware of any consumer for S3's offerings than VIA themselves as IGPs on the stuff they field on the EPIA and other lines of motherboard chipsets. It might be a different story overseas, but without info from someplace like Taiwan or elsewhere, I can only go on what I'm seeing here in the States.

They do appear to have beta drivers for their latest Chrome boards available, though they're closed compared to the official VIA support on what we DO have.

[curaga]

Another question: since you will be exposing MC and iDCT, will you be doing so for all of your hardware that supports either?

Aka all cards from Rage II+dvd onwards.

I happen to own that card. When I first got it, I was like "this has mpeg1 and mpeg2 MC, cool. Is it supported? No." My first disappointment in Ati.

I know you are forced to look at new chips first, but I really hope you will also concentrate on older HW that hasn't had HW accel yet. There you would beat Nvidia, because their cards have had HW accel since Geforce 2, but their driver only supports XvMC from Geforce4 onwards.

[bridgman]

For anything earlier than Radeon I wasn't planning to publish documents but would try to provide info to developers who were working on something specific. Finding information will be tough though -- the Rage II is something like 8 generations old by now.

Do you think MC acceleration on the old cards will be any use these days, ie are developers going to spend the time to support it ? I doubt the hardware is fast enough to handle anything more than SD resolution.

[curaga]

It will still be of good use. For light media centers, such as Geexbox or a Mythtv frontend, they are used in older computers, with the cards that are in them.

So, any user who owns a card capable of MC would want to get a chance to use it. This is just how I see it, and I would love to get it to use too.
If it makes anything playable on a comp that wasn't playable before, it's worth it.

For an example, my Pentium 2 366Mhz box, with the said card (Rage II+dvd) can play dvd-resolution Xvid videos with Geexbox and Vidix Ati acceleration. Vidix however only accelerates the drawing part, not the decoding. And as such, the box can't play H.264. I have read somewhere that MC is about 20% of the decoding, so I believe using it might make this play H.264 in SD resolutions.

[bridgman]

Vidix however only accelerates the drawing part, not the decoding. And as such, the box can't play H.264. I have read somewhere that MC is about 20% of the decoding, so I believe using it might make this play H.264 in SD resolutions.

I'm pretty sure we're only talking about MPEG-2 acceleration for the older chips. MC for H.264 is quite a bit more complex than MC for MPEG-2 -- block size, motion vector resolution, number of reference frames, and interpolation between reference pixels are all different. H.264 MC is expensive for precisely that reason -- it does more complex processing than what was needed for MPEG2.

It's a fairly safe bet that the older MC hardware was designed for SD MPEG-2 only -- that's why we didn't see much interest in supporting that hardware today. We can try to dig up the HW info when we get to video in a couple of months but I wouldn't get my hopes up.

[curaga]

Ah. I was afraid it would be like that.

Anyway, thanks

[legume]

Hi

It's really cool to see AMD supporting oss and engaging users as in this thread.

One question I have is about h/w deinterlacing.

Do the r5xx,6xx chips have this capability and if so will it be possible to support/release docs for it?

Thanks.

[soundworks2]

DRM

I'm very nice surprised seeing posts with AMD person on phoronix, with lot of substance! I belive when peoples start speaking together, the will better undestend each other and they needs.

From my part I just like to add to the DRM discussion just one analogy. DRM is simpliefied for me discusion about encryption/decryption and certificates/keys management. It remebers me very strong on the discussion about Encryption with Wifi Drivers....

In my opinion, the company, which want keep secrets, they shoudn't put it in Drivers but put it in HW firmware ( or some special EPROM place which can't be readen directly.. )like it ends up on wifi HW. This way will also be easier for them to maintain it. Drivers for windows and Linux will do the same for DRM calling basicaly calling some functions provided by HW.

[butdie]

it's nonsense to me

I don't even want any hardware with built-in DRM support.

all the discussion makes it clear to me, go Intel for video.

my old intel i830 onboard video can play aiglx well, while my much later ati card with 256MB dedicated vram is still struggling to play full screen video.

it's really nice to watch RMS's sign,"Don't buy from ATI, enemy of your feedom"

I reckon that CPUs will get fast enough to handle HD content in a couple of years without GPU acceleration. I can remember back in the late 90s/early 00s when you had to have GPU acceleration or a hardware mpeg2 card to watch DVDs. My old k6-2 500 with 128 Mb Ram and 16 Mb 3dfx card couldn't handle watching DVDs. Most modern computers can.

My c2d 1.6 gig laptop can handle 720p hd content without GPU acceleration on VLC media player so I reckon in a couple of years the debate will be obsolete. What does anyone else think?