Radeon UVD Support Merged Into Mesa

After having gone through five public code revisions, AMD has finally committed their open-source Unified Video Decoder (UVD) support for accelerated video decoding over VDPAU into the Mesa Git repository.

At the beginning of the month I was first to report on AMD finally open-sourcing UVD code so that years after this UVD video encode/decode hardware has been present in Radeon HD graphics cards, it's finally being exposed by their open-source Linux graphics driver. Making it better than UVD on Catalyst, which is exposed via the XvBA interface, this open-source support is coming over the more widely adopted and preferred VDPAU -- Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix.

For those that happened to miss the announcement earlier this month, also check out Digging Deeper Into AMD's UVD Code Drop.

The news today is that the Mesa/Gallium3D changes for Radeon UVD have finally been committed to Mesa Git master. Christian König of AMD committed it just a short time ago with nearly two thousand new lines of code.

This UVD hardware-accelerated video playback support is for the R600g and RadeonSI drivers. Beyond needing this new Mesa code, there's also kernel Radeon DRM changes needed that won't be merged until the Linux 3.10 kernel in a few weeks time. There's also new Radeon microcode/firmware files that must also be present on the system.