VDPAU with the Radeon driver?

[nanonyme]

I'm not sure, do paid developers like dave, jerome and alex have NDAs regarding UVD? Or do they have just the free specs from AMD?

The NDA might not mention UVD specifically but it's very likely to cover it. They'd have to get the code checked (because they're sane people and don't want to risk NDA breech) by lawyers first to see whether the code violates NDA and the lawyers would immediately decide this piece of code will not be released.

[gbeauche]

Why is this technique not used in conjunction with UVD?
If it is possible for a whole GPU (nouveau) why shouldn't
it be possible for UVD?

Either nobody cares or why would any sane person RE something that is not even working properly in the first place? I mean, it wouldn't be much useful to reverse engineer bugs, unless you know what they are and how you could fix them. Though I don't see how since you probably would have to generate another firmware. Too much hassle for little gain.

I believe there are much more chances to get UVD specs someday than have someone to fully understand and RE the UVD. Personnal opinion, of course, we are not guaranteed to get UVD specs either.

[Rabauke]

Do it then?

Stay focused, I only talked about the overall possibility!

It's just that reverse engineering it and actually releasing it would probably be a NDA breech for about all of the paid developers so I doubt they want to get their hands dirty with it. Any community developer who has no NDA related to AMD could give it a shot.

I'm not sure, do paid developers like dave, jerome and alex have NDAs regarding UVD? Or do they have just the free specs from AMD?
Anyway, I suppose they have other things to do.

GSoC would have been nice.

[rohcQaH]

[reverse engineering]
If it is possible for a whole GPU (nouveau) why shouldn't it be possible for UVD?

that's a misunderstanding. NVidia's GPUs are only partially RE'd, it's likely that the devs understand just enough to get their code working.

Most notably, the video decode units inside nvidia GPUs haven't been RE'd yet, either, and cannot be used with nouveau. That's because those things are protected well, if they're RE'd that could cost the respective vendor a lot of money.

[Jimbo]

I suspect that the UVD is specially protected against reverse engineering. So if "normal" reverse engineering is difficult, this should be a real challenge.

[nanonyme]

Here is an item nobody is talking about: reverse engineering.

Why is this technique not used in conjunction with UVD?
If it is possible for a whole GPU (nouveau) why shouldn't
it be possible for UVD?

Do it then? It's just that reverse engineering it and actually releasing it would probably be a NDA breech for about all of the paid developers so I doubt they want to get their hands dirty with it. Any community developer who has no NDA related to AMD could give it a shot.

[Veerappan]

Afaik the idea is to implement the video decoding as a Gallium3D state tracker so it would Just Work (yeah, right) with all Gallium drivers.

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/SummerOfCodeIdeas

Looks like it was put forth as a Google SoC idea, but didn't get picked up (Phoronix reported on this a week or two back).

I think it's a great idea though, and I'd love to see this come to pass. I'm also shopping around for a thesis project at the moment, but I have to see if there's interest from the school, if it meets the requirements for the program, and if the school's going to try to assert ownership of the produced code (and whether I'd be able to do release the source after I'm done as a result).

[markg85]

Here is an item nobody is talking about: reverse engineering.

Why is this technique not used in conjunction with UVD?
If it is possible for a whole GPU (nouveau) why shouldn't
it be possible for UVD?

The article i just read on THIS SITE about UVD mentioned that it would probably be not much of a challenge to reverse engineer it (so easy?!)

Someone just have to give it a shot...
On the other hand it's probably not usable in the near future for my card (5770)... perhaps for those r300 guys (if that has UVD)

[Rabauke]

Here is an item nobody is talking about: reverse engineering.

Why is this technique not used in conjunction with UVD?
If it is possible for a whole GPU (nouveau) why shouldn't
it be possible for UVD?

[nanonyme]

Basically, patent problems

It's not so much about patents than copy protection inside the hardware sold to us. It's not used for anything on Linux side but on Windows side for - unless I've understood completely wrong - for eg Bluray movie playback so that the content is unencrypted at least minute by the hardware functionality in the card itself and you can't get in between trivially. Now, we don't really care that much of that copy protection anyway but the problem is that the UVD hardware and that copy protection are too tightly integrated into each other in current hardware and AMD hasn't been able to give documentation on one without revealing critical bits of the other. And they really cannot afford to reveal anything of the digital rights management functionality without serious issues for them on Windows side.
With future chips this might be different but that's irrelevant with the situation at hand. For now shader-based decoding is the best we're going to have.