AMD Catalyst 7.12 Linux Driver -- The Baby's In Surgery

[ivanovic]

why don't you like DRM? if you pay you get, and if someone sells anything, you mustn't steal it, and DRM is just a way to prevent it.

The main problem about DRM I see is that the user is no more in control of the content he buys. If you eg buy a normal DVD these days, there won't be any problem to play it in any player anytime and as often as you want. The same for a music cd and stuff like that.

But once DRM is on the content, the license is basically checked when ever you want to play it and it might be said "no, you are no more allowed to listen to this piece of music", where the reason might either be that the company who sold you the music is bankrupt or they want to sell it again. This problem does not only exist for music but for videos, too. With the new "copy-protection" used on blue-ray and hd-dvd it is possible to say "no, this player is not allowed to play me" and "no, you are not allowed to use the digital out to play the soundtrack of that movie" for the simple sake of "a user could make a copy of it".

So basically the DRM is used to allow the companys to control what the user does with media he bought and it is even possible to revoke the rights you should have gained by buying a product.

Simply said: the user is no longer in control of his data and where he is allowed to use things in which way.

[eigerhar]

Other problem

So basically the DRM is used to allow the companys to control what the user does with media he bought and it is even possible to revoke the rights you should have gained by buying a product.

You're right and what DRM does is completely ILLEGAL in EU. And the complaints of users will have success at court.


But the problem HERE with the graphical card is much WORSE. The problem, you're speaking about, concerns users that want to buy DRM content.

But I don't!

I hate modern music! (It's only rhythm without soul. I'm singing gregorian chant myself.)
I hat cinema. I NEVER go to cinema. The world of hollywood is a completely artifical and insane world.
I never buy DVD's. I've even no player (but now I can play them with my laptop. I've tested and it works.)

I only want to look GOOD TV all over the world. (My local TV is miserable). DRM is FORBIDDEN for public TV in Europe. Also I want to look FREETV all over the world.

This will need h.264 in the future (DVB-H).

But the DRM industry blocks MY graphical card!!!
Only because of money. Money for films and music that I hate.

The only good thing is that they block themselfs on Linux. Linux users will look divX if there is no usefull h.264 decoder accessible. No Linux User will buy DRM content.

This will make GROW the piratery (with converted divX).
This will help Windows. Because there are no restrictions on hardware decoders.

[givemesugarr]

The main problem about DRM I see is that the user is no more in control of the content he buys. If you eg buy a normal DVD these days, there won't be any problem to play it in any player anytime and as often as you want. The same for a music cd and stuff like that.

But once DRM is on the content, the license is basically checked when ever you want to play it and it might be said "no, you are no more allowed to listen to this piece of music", where the reason might either be that the company who sold you the music is bankrupt or they want to sell it again. This problem does not only exist for music but for videos, too. With the new "copy-protection" used on blue-ray and hd-dvd it is possible to say "no, this player is not allowed to play me" and "no, you are not allowed to use the digital out to play the soundtrack of that movie" for the simple sake of "a user could make a copy of it".

So basically the DRM is used to allow the companys to control what the user does with media he bought and it is even possible to revoke the rights you should have gained by buying a product.

Simply said: the user is no longer in control of his data and where he is allowed to use things in which way.

well, i'll never buy a product that will let me play it just for some a limited number of times. if they'd want me to buy that crap i pretend to use it whenever i like it and every time i like it. also i do agree with them on not making backup copy if they'd ship me without any supplementary cost a new cd of the same album whenever the old one begins to play bad. if they want me to behave like that i pretend them to give me a full 24h-365(6) days service. if not, then go to h*** and have that crap sold to some other idiot. i'll go buy it on itunes or amazon without drm or i'll listen to it (with a little luck) on lastfm (i've recently discovered this service and it's a damn cool stuff). by the way, are there any other services like lastfm?

You're right and what DRM does is completely ILLEGAL in EU. And the complaints of users will have success at court.


But the problem HERE with the graphical card is much WORSE. The problem, you're speaking about, concerns users that want to buy DRM content.

But I don't!

I hate modern music! (It's only rhythm without soul. I'm singing gregorian chant myself.)
I hat cinema. I NEVER go to cinema. The world of hollywood is a completely artifical and insane world.
I never buy DVD's. I've even no player (but now I can play them with my laptop. I've tested and it works.)

I only want to look GOOD TV all over the world. (My local TV is miserable). DRM is FORBIDDEN for public TV in Europe. Also I want to look FREETV all over the world.

This will need h.264 in the future (DVB-H).

But the DRM industry blocks MY graphical card!!!
Only because of money. Money for films and music that I hate.

The only good thing is that they block themselfs on Linux. Linux users will look divX if there is no usefull h.264 decoder accessible. No Linux User will buy DRM content.

This will make GROW the piratery (with converted divX).
This will help Windows. Because there are no restrictions on hardware decoders.

i still do believe that h264 is awesome when compared to divx or xvid in terms of quality/compression. and i really think that in the future we'll see it hw accelerated also on linux, since it's some great format. when it will become a widespread format like divx was and it still is then someone will surely start rev-eng on the drivers either for osx, the most likely to work well since h264 is the official format adopted by apple and i'm sure that their drivers are using the hw acceleration for h264. i'm quite sure about this thing, since it would be damn stupid for apple not to use it; for what i've know their drivers are homemade and developed especially for the boards from the nda specs given by the gpu companies, but on this john might be of help on confirming this statement. so since i've seen some ports of apple hw from osx to linux i wouldn't be surprised to see in the future, when h264 would have killed the old divx and its competitors, some linux port or maybe some binary blob from the video companies for linux. i really hope that next year boards from amd, nvidia and intel would have a separate drm enabler not directly included into the video decoding module. this could be a way of handling stuff: a check on the hw inserted and if it is drm protected then the drm module would block its playing and it would playable only using sw accel. but for this we still need some time since blu-ray and hd-dvd have still a great cost and since the winner between the 2 hasn't been chosen yet, i think that the worse of the 2 will be the winner so that should be blu-ray in the end as it happened with the vhs vs betamax (how many memories this brings back).

[eigerhar]

The question is now!!!

In the future every computer will decode h.264 by software. Someone who has the money for a HD3870 has also the money for a Penryn. And what is one without the other?

For future computers and GPU's(>RV700) UVD is ridiculous.

But if DRM continous boycotting open source operating systems they will lose those potential buyers NOW. DivX also makes progresses. In futur open source codecs will be equivalent to h.264. But the industry goes h.264.

DRM have to understand that the Open Source users are no more a little group. If DRM boycotts open source operating systems divX will EXCLUSIVELY be established in those communities. H.264 will be converted to divX. And this can be copied as many times as you wish.

Nobody will buy new films or music if he does convert it to divx any way. He can directly copy it from another divx. Only if DRM opens his policy there will be Linux users that buy their products. Without decoder it is nonsense to buy a h.264 media.

[Uchikoma]

In the future every computer will decode h.264 by software. Someone who has the money for a HD3870 has also the money for a Penryn. And what is one without the other?

For future computers and GPU's(>RV700) UVD is ridiculous.

But if DRM continous boycotting open source operating systems they will lose those potential buyers NOW. DivX also makes progresses. In futur open source codecs will be equivalent to h.264. But the industry goes h.264.

DRM have to understand that the Open Source users are no more a little group. If DRM boycotts open source operating systems divX will EXCLUSIVELY be established in those communities. H.264 will be converted to divX. And this can be copied as many times as you wish.

Nobody will buy new films or music if he does convert it to divx any way. He can directly copy it from another divx. Only if DRM opens his policy there will be Linux users that buy their products. Without decoder it is nonsense to buy a h.264 media.

Closed source DivX, and the open-source Xvid are codec implementations of the MPEG-4 (part 2) standards otherwise known as MPEG-4 ASP.
Open source x.264 and open source libavcodec are encoder and (contains) decoder for the MPEG-4 (part 10) standards, otherwise known as MPEG-4 H.264/AVC.

You can't compare a codec against a specification haha. ^^;

Currently, there's nothing stopping users from encoding and decoding H.264 encoded streams, so I don't see how the fact that DRM being applied to H.264 encoded video streams will make an impact on our choice of what we use. You said it yourself...eventually (when processors can handle it), the computers will be able to do it using software decoders. Thus, hardware assisted decoding will become optional, and it won't affect us much whether it will only play DRM content or not.

DivX the codec...or Xvid the codec...they never will match compressiblity offered by h.264 encoded streams either. DivX and Xvid as mentioned above, implement the Part 2 specs of MPEG-4. To match h.264, they'd have to move to implementing Part 10. Something that would (most likely) require them to start over again. I can also rant about other nice tidbits aside from compression that makes h.264 streams much nicer xD

[givemesugarr]

Closed source DivX, and the open-source Xvid are implementations of the MPEG-4 (part 2) standards.

With regards to open source codecs...
x264 is an open source encoder implementation for h.264, and there are decoding libraries out there for h.264 (libavcodec comes to mind which is also open source -> LGPL). These ones encode and decode (respectively) according to the MPEG-4 Part 10 standard (MPEG-4 Part 10 AVC/H.264). I don't believe they are fully complete, but they're already fairly well used. In which case, there's no reason why DivX would be exclusively established as the codec of choice...never mind H.264, they got Xvid up their alley (and I use Xvid over DivX) to compete with.

...if you're talking about DivX (or Xvid) reaching h264 spec levels of compression when referring to open source, it's not going to happen. DivX and Xvid would have to implement the specs for Part 10, and not Part 2, which is what they are currently conforming to.

For ripping content from the discs, it's not how it's encoded that's the problem. It doesn't matter if the stream is MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 Part 10 encoded. What you would be worrying about is how to defeat the protection preventing you from making that copy.

i'd like to make just one precisation: h264 is an iso/iec standard codec, which means that it's specs are fully documented and that opensource community could use them to implement it. and this is true for all the iso, itu or ieee standards. do you think that the linux 802.1 stack differs in the specs from the 802.1 stack for windows?! it doesn't in the base code. the same goes with the h264 format.
i personally like the standardization of things since you don't have to bother anymore for misbehaviours for your standard apps as is happening for example with sites that use iexplore only features which on firefox wouldn't run as they should. this is just an example and this should also let you understood why i'm pro for the standardization of an ooxml version, even if it would need some other work to be of a good level: it would finally make office documents fully compatible with oopenoffice or koffice or whatever opensource app that would want to implement its features. from i've understood reading around the web, the problem with ooxml as it's now is that it was born from a damaged mind and the specs are a true labyrinth (immagine a program wich has nested goto in its source code that point out somewhere in the 20 milions of code lines). this old naughty microsoft is now starting a war between gnome who supports this standard (remember novell agreement and novell own the trademark gnome) and kde which seems to deny its implementation. i really hope that this news given the last month is not true, cause that a war between gnome and kde would only mean damage for opensource community.

ps. if you still haven't read about the last microboy issue then read here : http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1006008 this seems to have just been corrected but the following news is even more better :

http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1005965

i haven't read other news about this issue and if it has been also corrected, but i have to say that after removing windows from my pc to stick with gentoo these news would only give make me smile at evening when i come back from work and read them.
don't you agree?!

[eigerhar]

Useless clarifications!!!

Closed source DivX, and the open-source Xvid are codec implementations of the MPEG-4 (part 2) standards otherwise known as MPEG-4 ASP.
Open source x.264 and open source libavcodec are encoder and (contains) decoder for the MPEG-4 (part 10) standards, otherwise known as MPEG-4 H.264/AVC.

Thank you for the clarifications! But you have nothing understood about the problem I'm mentioning.

Yes! You're right XVid would even be better than divx because it's open source. But this is not the question here. It's not a question about open source or not.

Yes x.264 exists and h.264 can be played by a High End PC on Linux.


I did never say anything else.


But the ATI graphical card is there to play h.264 on NORMAL (not high end) PC (with UVD). And that you can't do on Linux!!!
Because the DRM rights management blocks the opening of the driver.

So for the moment you CAN'T play h.264 on Linux.
Yes in the future you can ON SOFTWARE (thats what your libavcodec is for). The x.264 doesn't change anything. It's handled by SOFTWARE.

For a normal PC it's strictly IMPOSSIBLE to play h.264 and the DRM policy is the reason why!

[Kano]

DRM has nothing to do with h264. There are lots of those media files out there, some even in matroska containers. Only on blue-ray or hd dvd the files are encrypted which can be h264 too. And only those can be restricted using offial ways to playback that these only can be viewed using hdcp over dvi (or hdmi). As soon as you find a way to decrypt the data no restrictions will apply to you - you can keep your current hardware and dont need to buy new monitor/gfx card to watch it. Of course your pc has still to be fast enough.

[yoshi314]

But the ATI graphical card is there to play h.264 on NORMAL (not high end) PC (with UVD). And that you can't do on Linux!!!
Because the DRM rights management blocks the opening of the driver.

not only that.

do you know why most linux distributions do not ship with proprietary drivers, and don't include mp3/mpeg4/h264 support by default, even though there are opensource implementations of those?

because of software patents in the us. that's why i doubt gfx card vendors will be able to provide h264/xvid/mpeg4 support in their cards in opensource form.

software patents are even worse than drm, because they don't get that much in our way, so there are only a few people opposing them.

[Kano]

Well most problematic are encoders and decss for Linux distributions, like you will not find unrestriced ffmpeg (the ones you find can only encode a part of the possible codecs) or lame (due to mp3 patent) or mencoder (mp3 too and others) usually in official repositories. mplayer can ship when you disable/remove support for css - a pure variant has this feature builtin. Of course you can always build from scatch to get fully working versions.