NVIDIA Puts Out A Major Beta Linux Driver Update

[DeepDayze]

Yes, they have. There's even a small benchmark.

OTOH, OpenCL is a standard and CUDA is just a vendor specific API. I'd also prefer OpenCL even it is a bit harder to code.

I also believe nVidia offered CUDA to AMD as well.

[smitty3268]

I also believe nVidia offered CUDA to AMD as well.

Only if AMD gave NVidia all their hardware specifications, as i recall. Not going to happen.

[brent]

No I think we have to see OpenCL added to mplayer etc. CUDE only works on nvidia gfx's, but OpenCL works on almost all vendors.

What are you getting at? OpenCL isn't that useful for video decoding.

[deanjo]

Only if AMD gave NVidia all their hardware specifications, as i recall. Not going to happen.

Can you back that up?

[deanjo]

What are you getting at? OpenCL isn't that useful for video decoding.

I wouldn't say that, it can be useful just not as efficient as dedicated hardware. CoreAVC has a successful Cuda decoder and there is also a Cuda Dirac decoder as well. OpenCL would be just as suitable for a GPGPU framework to get those tasks done. The real power however would be however the flexibility in post processing and/or encoding.

[brent]

CoreAVC merely uses nvcuvid, to get around the artifical limitations of DXVA, but that's it. Never heard about the Dirac decoder though.

I don't doubt that partial acceleration with a shader-based video decoder is possible, but I very much doubt that it will be efficient enough to be interesting in practice. Also, it's not trivial at all to implement.

Just look at how very mediocre offload was with NVidia's/AMD's early attempts at video decoding that only accelerated MC and deblocking. You won't get more acceleration than that with shader-based decoding. Heck, they didn't put all that extra logic for video decoding into newer chips for fun.

[jbrown96]

What is the premiere VDPAU-capable media player? I've been using a mix of VLC and SMplayer for a few months, but neither seems to work acceptably.

VLC works the best, but the OSD control in fullscreen is all black on my system. That's just a minor cosmetic issue. The bigger issue is that VLC doesn't support VDPAU (at least the current Fedora version).
SMplayer with VDPAU is great for my system, buts it has lots of bugs for me. If I resize the video (i.e. fullscreen) or pause/then play the video, the video freezes but audio plays correctly. I have to seek to get it working again.

I assume that my troubles with SMplayer are mostly pebkac. Anyone know a workaround, or a better application?

[Silent Storm]

What are you getting at? OpenCL isn't that useful for video decoding.

I hate to disagree but, ATI had an OpenGL demo called VideoShader demo that postprocessed the video of your choice on the fly and it was a big hit with 9500/9700 cards. They were also able to decode and accelerate H.264 videos on a 9600XT, even on Linux (I have witnessed negligible CPU loads while decoding some HD content using XVideo acceleration).

If they were able to do this with pure OpenGL, I think it's possible to decode video on a chip that can manipulate matrices just for fun. In fact, video decoding is just altering frames (which are matrices) according to a original template (keyframe) using some math-magic.

It can be done and the development process shall be fun, I presume.

[deanjo]

What is the premiere VDPAU-capable media player?

By far the best implementation so far is XBMC (MythTV as well). SMplayer works well as well, at least on openSUSE and your problem doesn't seem replicable on it.

[smitty3268]

Can you back that up?

Hmm, I guess not. I got that from another poster and no one called him out on it, so i figured it was legit. Now that i've looked into it, i'm not sure where it came from and whether it was true or not. I believe what he was saying was that nvidia was offering to build support for amd chips into their compiler, which obviously would require giving them knowledge of how to program it.

Anyway, i'm not sure why anyone would choose CUDA for something cross platform right now anyway. I thought that was the whole point of OpenCL, to create a language that was compatible between different hardware. Why would AMD suddenly create a 2nd language, one that it's competitor controls and could modify to make their hardware look bad.