AMD Hiring For Another Open-Source GPU Driver Developer With Multimedia Expertise

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Hiring For Another Open-Source GPU Driver Developer With Multimedia Expertise

It's great seeing AMD continuing to hire for more Linux/open-source driver developers. Beyond their many roles they are still working to fill on the CPU side of the house, they have a new job posting in hiring for their open-source GPU driver stack with a focus on multimedia efforts...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-2022-Multimedia-Hiring

[Danny3]

Wow, this is great!
I'd love to have built-in into mesa good support for video / audio decoding / encoding!

Especially for newer codecs like AV1, HEVC, AVC, FLAC, Opus, AAC.

Now only if AMD would care about HDR too and implement it properly in a way that it's easy for desktop environments and players to support it.

I still don't get how it's possible that on Windows 7 (that never had any kind of HDR support) I could use MPC-HC+MadVr (from K-lite codec pack) to send HDR enabled videos along with the proper HDR metadata to a HDR capable monitor or TV and display them accordingly and on Linux I can't do that.


What's the big magic trick that MPC-HC+MadVR does to be able to send HDR metadata to the monitor or TV on Windows 7 that cannot be done on Linux?
Does the AMD's driver for Windows 7 has something the the Linux driver doesn't have?

I see that Kodi media center has support for HDR playback only on Windows 10 and Android:

https://kodi.tv/article/kodi-19-0-matrix-release/

And even the next Kodi version will not be able to have support for HDR playback on Linux:

https://kodi.tv/article/kodi-nexus-alpha-1/

So I really wish AMD would seriously tackle the HDR support issue on Linux seriously, at least for video playback.
There are more and more movies released and videos from our phones that come with HDR metadata and we cannot playback them properly on our HDR capable monitors and TVs.

I am thinking that if the MadVr developer single-handedly managed to do it on Windows 7, then it must not be as complicated as it might seem for company with enough resources to do it too.

[Quackdoc]

Wow, this is great!
I'd love to have built-in into mesa good support for video / audio decoding / encoding!

Especially for newer codecs like AV1, HEVC, AVC, FLAC, Opus, AAC.

there already is in the way of vaapi, and audio codecs belong in software, not hardware. vulkan video would certainly be nice

Does the AMD's driver for Windows 7 has something the the Linux driver doesn't have?

yeah, it's called a display server that works with HDR. HDR works with amdvlk on MPV when run via TTY. HDR issue has nothing to do with AMD and everything to do with the lack of support in xorg and wayland. sadly with how fast wayland is, My non yet existent children will graduate by the time wayland get support, and xorg is on lifesupport

[skeevy420]

I wonder if AMD will go the Apple route and make what I'll call socketed SOCs instead of CPUs? I know that I'd prefer my smart car to be as integrated as possible.

Quackdoc FLAC, AptX, Mp3, AAC, and other popular/highly used codecs outta be in hardware, especially in systems where you want as many CPU/GPU cycles going towards the program than something superfluous like audio.

For example, I'd rather my CPU/GPU cycles be used by the car's safety systems than for playing some Yardbirds.

Oh, toss me into the Wendy's "Where's the HDR?" ad campaign.

[Hibbelharry]

I wonder if AMD will go the Apple route and make what I'll call socketed SOCs instead of CPUs? I know that I'd prefer my smart car to be as integrated as possible.

Every Ryzen CPU is a SOC. You're able to run a PC system with a Ryzen CPU without any chipset, having most of the current usual bus systems for possible addons readily available.

[cytomax55]

I'm hoping this will make AMD a viable alternative to Intels Quick Sync...
things like emby (media server) and blue iris ( security camera DVR) use quick sync with minimal impact to cpu....

Is quick sync better because of something physical or because of software?

[skeevy420]

Every Ryzen CPU is a SOC. You're able to run a PC system with a Ryzen CPU without any chipset, having most of the current usual bus systems for possible addons readily available.

You misunderstand what I'm saying -- It's because of all that that I made the comment I did.

To be more specific: as die space shrinks more and more, I wouldn't be that surprised if they start adding even more specialist pieces to their CPUs since adding more and more general purpose CPU or GPU cores only goes so far in the name of more performance. Specialized DSPs for audio codecs is the damn loop stuck in my head because one specialized audio core can be better than 1000 generic ones, but, similar to the M1, AI/ML cores could be added to be used by things like radar and self-driving sensors detecting other vehicles in traffic or for FSR3 in games (their upcoming GPUs are supposed to have some specialist cores for FSR3).

[M@GOid]

They sure can use someone in this area. Right now VA-API is having hiccups on VP9 and AV-1 codecs on AMD hardwre.

[agd5f]

Wow, this is great!
Now only if AMD would care about HDR too and implement it properly in a way that it's easy for desktop environments and players to support it.

FWIW, we've been working with various upstream communities to enable HDR support for several years now. It's not just the driver that needs to expose HDR capabilities, you also have to make use of them in desktop environments. There are lots of ways to expose the underlying hardware capabilities and the challenge is coming up with a solution that everyone can agree on.

[timofonic]

Meanwhile, they don't hire proper sizable team ti make ROCm and all OpenCL HIP etc computing stuff to not suck.