AMD's UVD2-based XvBA Finally Does Something On Linux

[bridgman]

Yes and no. It's obviously speculative information until we have the fix in a release that passes QA testing -- and once that happens the release gets into users hands quickly anyways. I would like to see us release more of that speculative info, but as long as it keeps getting twisted into "AMD promises..." and used to beat us with it's going to be a pretty tough sell.

For now, you know it's being worked on, and any additional info isn't really going to make much difference until the work gets out the door in a release.

[gbeauche]

Yes, QA is important because a feature may be working for some time but this can get horribly undermined by a regression in another part of the driver thus rendering the whole pretty useless or unusable. So, even if there is a target release, nothing is sure until you get the final release of the driver out. However, there are strong constraints to get this out at a specific time.

That info is absolutely nothing for NDA because everybody who has got the hardware or intends to buy should know that!

This won't change much. Any normal and sane person willing to buy X or Y will check if this meets his requirements right now. Otherwise, he would never buy anything. And, at this time, the best working solutions for H.264 decoding available to Linux are Broadcom, Intel and NVIDIA. Needless to say, this is in lexicographical order.

[xipu]

So, what's new in xvba-video-0.6.10 and libva_0.31.0-1+sds11? I just noticed that they were added to the download pages on March 18..

[Kano]

From the changelogs:

libva (0.31.0-1+sds11) hardy; urgency=low

* G45 updates:
- Add vaDeriveImage().
- Fix YV12 image format.
* OpenGL extensions updates:
- Dynamically allocate VA/GLX vtable.
- Fix display context destruction chain.
* Upgrade to GIT snapshot 2010/03/08:
- Merge SDS patches 010, 320.
- Fix test/encode/h264encode.c issue.

-- Gwenole Beauchesne <[email protected]> Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:26:13 +0000

The funny thing is the date

Version 0.6.10 - 18.Mar.2010
* Add I420 image format
* Add support for VA-API 0.31.0-sds6
* Fix destruction of child windows used by vaPutSurface()

[Aaron]

Hello all,

I am really excited about all of this. While I fully appreciate bridgman's comments that AMD/ATi didn't promise much, I bought my 780G over a year ago and expected the UVD on it to work in the near future. I also mistakenly believed that all information about the cards had been publically released (including the UVD parts) and that Free drivers would be able to support this feature. Needless to say I was a bit disappointed when I found out the truth, especially as an nVidia alternative would have allowed VDPAU from the time that I bought it. I'm happy to see AMD/ATi using VA-API for its acceleration instead of creating yet another API.

Since AMD/ATi "opened up", I have been an avid supporter and bought only AMD/ATi cards. In New Zealand, however, our digital TV uses HD H.264 and practically needs acceleration to play properly. I have been stuck on analogue for my MythTV HTPC and have been trying to buy a cheap nVidia 8600GT to put in my 780G for VDPAU. I'm now hopeful that these recent changes may stop this being necessary. I was reading this:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Release_Notes_-_0.23
I believe that 0.23 will include VA-API:
http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/browser/t...64.c?rev=23525
http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/browser/t...pi.c?rev=23525

On that note, I would really appreciate it if somebody who has the UVD/VA-API setup working could test that the samples on the following page are being properly accelerated:
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/Fossie/4877

Thank you to everybody who is working on this.

Bridgman: I follow your posts avidly. They are very informative and helpful. I understand that AMD has not yet decided whether or not it will release the UVD specs to those developing Free drivers. This is really important to me ? if I wanted to be stuck with non-free drivers, I would be using nVidia. The best result would be if the Free drivers could utilise the UVD hardware. If this isn't possible with the current architecture for DRM reasons, please put pressure on AMD/ATi to resolve this in future UVD versions so that these two things can be separated. I realise this thread is about the proprietary AMD/ATi drivers, but I want to flag that I only consider the non-Free drivers a stop-gap until the Free drivers accelerate video enough (whether through UVD, Gallium3D shaders etc.) to allow my CPU to decode 1080i in real time.

Regards,

Aaron

[Kano]

Basically vaapi is only "working" when you want so when you use mplayer, vlc works from time to time too, currently it is broken with xvba, but mostly working with nvidia. Wrappers seem to be always problematic, the many issues i had with vdpau-video too. I can no say something about psb, that would have got native vaapi (g45 too, but currently only mpeg2, thats boring).

[gbeauche]

Basically vaapi is only "working" when you want so when you use mplayer, vlc works from time to time too, currently it is broken with xvba, but mostly working with nvidia. Wrappers seem to be always problematic, the many issues i had with vdpau-video too. I can no say something about psb, that would have got native vaapi (g45 too, but currently only mpeg2, thats boring).

It's only problematic when the user can't seem to be able to install the right package or he always mixes up his installation on some weird distribution... Otherwise, it's working the same. In the XvBA case, it's even the only way to get useful things since by default this API (and implementation) is not that helpful, to remain "positive"...

[Kano]

"always", well i had one old lib once in my home, currently i remove the dist dir and everything is installed from scratch. It definitely does not work with vlc current only mplayer.

[DivineGrace]

Hello all,

I am really excited about all of this. While I fully appreciate bridgman's comments that AMD/ATi didn't promise much, I bought my 780G over a year ago and expected the UVD on it to work in the near future. I also mistakenly believed that all information about the cards had been publically released (including the UVD parts) and that Free drivers would be able to support this feature. Needless to say I was a bit disappointed when I found out the truth, especially as an nVidia alternative would have allowed VDPAU from the time that I bought it. I'm happy to see AMD/ATi using VA-API for its acceleration instead of creating yet another API.

Since AMD/ATi "opened up", I have been an avid supporter and bought only AMD/ATi cards. In New Zealand, however, our digital TV uses HD H.264 and practically needs acceleration to play properly. I have been stuck on analogue for my MythTV HTPC and have been trying to buy a cheap nVidia 8600GT to put in my 780G for VDPAU. I'm now hopeful that these recent changes may stop this being necessary. I was reading this:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Release_Notes_-_0.23
I believe that 0.23 will include VA-API:
http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/browser/t...64.c?rev=23525
http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/browser/t...pi.c?rev=23525

On that note, I would really appreciate it if somebody who has the UVD/VA-API setup working could test that the samples on the following page are being properly accelerated:
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/Fossie/4877

Thank you to everybody who is working on this.

Bridgman: I follow your posts avidly. They are very informative and helpful. I understand that AMD has not yet decided whether or not it will release the UVD specs to those developing Free drivers. This is really important to me ? if I wanted to be stuck with non-free drivers, I would be using nVidia. The best result would be if the Free drivers could utilise the UVD hardware. If this isn't possible with the current architecture for DRM reasons, please put pressure on AMD/ATi to resolve this in future UVD versions so that these two things can be separated. I realise this thread is about the proprietary AMD/ATi drivers, but I want to flag that I only consider the non-Free drivers a stop-gap until the Free drivers accelerate video enough (whether through UVD, Gallium3D shaders etc.) to allow my CPU to decode 1080i in real time.

Regards,

Aaron

Aaron, I was unsuccessful in playing the freeview HD sample from here:

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/downloads/04-11_13-30-01_Freeview_HD_.zip

This is with mplayer-va-api-20100212, ubuntu 9.04, and HD 2600

[Aaron]

Aaron, I was unsuccessful in playing the freeview HD sample from here:

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/downloads/04-11_13-30-01_Freeview_HD_.zip

This is with mplayer-va-api-20100212, ubuntu 9.04, and HD 2600

Thank you,

I could not get that particular file to play properly for me without any acceleration, so I wonder if there is something wrong with the file. Did the other samples play accelerated?

Regards,

Aaron