XvMC Comes To xf86-video-unichrome Driver

Earlier this year Luc Verhaegen, one of the key contributors to the RadeonHD graphics driver, was laid off from Novell after a round of cutbacks at their German facility. While remaining unemployed, Luc has contributed to the CoreBoot project with ATI graphics card flashing support and native VGA text mode support, among other work. Additionally, he continues to dabble with his own open-source VIA driver, xf86-video-unichrome.

This driver, which competes alongside xf86-video-via and xf86-video-openchrome, now offers XvMC VLD support. However, it's not a traditional implementation of X-Video Motion Compensation, but rather Luc ended up designing his own X extension in the X protocol for sending MPEG slices to the hardware. This was done due to not liking the design of traditional XvMC implementations, which he describes in this blog post.

In the xf86-video-unichrome repository is this XvMC addition for the VT3122 and VT3108 ASICs with MPEG2 slice decoding support. XvMC is also supported by the OpenChrome driver.