AMD Releases Open-Source UVD Video Support

[Adarion]

JAWOHL!!

Sorry for this German outbreak of Yeeeeah! This is something I have waited for so long. It actually so rescued my day! The whole week! Even more!
Thanks!
And thanks also for using VDPAU. There is just much more support for it.

Hope that the old UVD 1 will also see some love.

I am so happy that I do not drink alcohol at all, otherwise I'd probably kill me with sparkling wine today!

[HokTar]

Hooray!

Terrific news!

I'd like to thank everybody involved in this project! Very well done ladies and gents!

[brent]

This leaves me wondering why the hell Intel still sticks to VA-API. NIH?

Software support always has been better for VDPAU.

[TheLexMachine]

Is the support for UVD1 also in progress?

Not likely. Those cards are End-Of-Life and I'm pretty sure they have dropped support for those cards on both Windows and Linux at this point.

[TemplarGR]

Great news!

Thank you AMD! This is indeed great!

There is only one big item for the Open source driver: Proper power management! Once it lands, we will only need performance optimisations, bug fixes, and new hardware support. I believe that the time when we will no longer need a binary driver for AMD gpus/apus is not far at all...

Since i own a HD3870, will you add support for UVD/UVD+ too? I know it is old, but it would be nice. I will probably not use it anyway, because software decoding is better quality wise and i have a quad core, but it would be useful for those with laptops and lesser hardware...

Anyway, thanks again for this support!

[brent]

I will probably not use it anyway, because software decoding is better quality wise and i have a quad core, but it would be useful for those with laptops and lesser hardware...

Modern video codecs are integer-based and no matter how decoding is done, the result is exactly the same, bit for bit. There is no quality difference.

[Adarion]

OMG, I just noticed that I could finally have a decent HTPC! Imagine a passively cooled E or even C-Series now working with video accel. I think some fuse in my mind just blew.

[Morpheus]

We still don't have complete Bluray support, so I'm not seeing a HTPC in my living room befor a long, long time.

Anyway it's a very good news to read for (at least partial) open source !

[calim]

Firmware is only something that communicates with the hardware, states what it can do, etc. Noone is hurt if it's closed source.

Can't say what the UVD firmware does (since it's closed source ...), but video decoding "firmware" on NV can do quite a bit. E.g. one of the stages of VP2 seems to be based on an Xtensa processor and you have to write decoding software for it to do anything ... now you might argue that the actual video decoding software part isn't very interesting, but it's surely A LOT of work, at least too much for the current size of the nouveau team (given all the other tasks with higher priority).
Granted, on the latest cards, the video decoding engines have been cast in hardware and only (?) require command processing firmware that poke the actual registers; not a simple task either ...

[curaga]

FTA:

So who is going to update the Xorg wiki RadeonFeature page? http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

The Feature Matrix for Free Radeon Drivers currently still says that the feature "Video Decode (XvMC/VDPAU/VA-API) on UVD" is red "ToDo" status. Surely it is "WIP" now

I tried too, but seems my wiki account has been removed, along with many others (all who are listed with hostnames/IPs/???s in the changelog instead of account names. Likely a casualty of the spam cleanups.