UVD/hw acceleration If, when?

[HokTar]

Yeah, "the plan" is on my PC rather than on a wiki page, guess I should change that

Any *plans* to do so?

[bridgman]

As of my previous post, yes. Prior to that, I guess not

[HokTar]

Then it was worth typing that much. Please post the link(s) here where you update "the plans"!

This is starting to resemble to the Battlestar Galactica movie "The Plan".

[agd5f]

-- evergreen: I think it's Alex's job (btw, why are you not consistent here and call it r800 in filenames?)

We stopped using Rxxx asic names so I switched to using the new asic naming scheme in the open source driver as well. There are no official R8xx/RV8xx names that I know of, so there's not really any point in trying to use them. It would just confuse matters.

[jonwil]

If people want to use the hardware video acceleration in the open source drivers so badly, just reverse engineer it via the closed source drivers.
If the noveau guys can reverse engineer entire GPUs without help from NVIDIA, I see no reason why the ATI-oss guys couldn't reverse engineer specific features.

[HokTar]

We stopped using Rxxx asic names so I switched to using the new asic naming scheme in the open source driver as well. There are no official R8xx/RV8xx names that I know of, so there's not really any point in trying to use them. It would just confuse matters.

Fair enough, then I misunderstood this, because I thought that r800 was "official". My bad.

If people want to use the hardware video acceleration in the open source drivers so badly, just reverse engineer it via the closed source drivers.
If the noveau guys can reverse engineer entire GPUs without help from NVIDIA, I see no reason why the ATI-oss guys couldn't reverse engineer specific features.

I guess nobody wants to do the hard work as long as there is a chance to get specs. So devs are waiting and doing something else in the meantime. Maybe there is also some concern about the possible bad reaction from AMD if somebody attempts this. However, I'm not implying that they should think that "we'll give you the specs we want, so we can decide what features you can get in the oss driver. And be happy that you actually got something!"

[gbeauche]

If people want to use the hardware video acceleration in the open source drivers so badly, just reverse engineer it via the closed source drivers.
If the noveau guys can reverse engineer entire GPUs without help from NVIDIA, I see no reason why the ATI-oss guys couldn't reverse engineer specific features.

RE won't be useful to you because of various bugs and omissions in the driver. So, good luck.

[rohcQaH]

If the noveau guys can reverse engineer entire GPUs without help from NVIDIA

They did not RE the "whole" GPU, just enough to get a driver working. Most notably, they did not RE nvidia's video acceleration, either.

Basic 2D/3D-operation is pretty straightforward, but the video decode units will have some extra protection/obfuscation/encryption against reverse engineering, because if the included DRM stuff is reverse engineered, the company is toast.

[darkbasic]

Exactly. UVD support is not in the plan right now, but we have said that we will investigate whether it is possible to add it to the plan once we get caught up with existing work (ie we don't plan to put UVD ahead of anything already in the plan).

I hope it will, UVD support is pretty much important for me.

[droidhacker]

I hope it will, UVD support is pretty much important for me.

It may *seem* important, but it isn't an all-or-nothing situation.
Go back and look at the radeon feature matrix: http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

You will note "Video Decode Using the 3D Engine". It may not be able to take over everything, but it should reduce the CPU strain to well within reasonable limits (rather than maxing out any dual-core and dropping frames).