AMD Releases Open-Source UVD Video Support

[Veerappan]

This may be the wrong question to ask, but for example my tv is HDCP, is it possible to disable HDCP (from the tv) so that this driver could be used? (Or is HDCP a requirement of HDMI?)

Your TV supports HDCP, but it should also operate without an encrypted connection. Otherwise, how would you hook up an older HDMI-based DVD player (or anything with component/composite cables)? As a general rule, TVs support HDCP, but they don't require it in most cases. Usually it's the device actually producing/playing the content that would refuse to produce output if HDCP isn't required (such as a Bluray player).

In the case of a HTPC with a radeon hooked up to a TV, HDCP is unsupported, so all of the display output is sent from your video card to the TV through an unencrypted connection. As long as you're not trying to play back encrypted Bluray discs with software that requires the encryption, you'll be fine.

[duby229]

I don't think HDCP has to be enabled in order to use HDMI (although I believe the *ability* to accept an HDCP-encrypted signal is an HDMI requirement).

We did run across a few displays back in the early days of HDCP which would only work if HDCP was enabled, but I haven't heard of that happening recently. Treat this as low quality information though, I'm just saying "I didn't hear anything like that in the hallway and usually I would hear about it if something like that was happening"...

OK, Thanks for that. The TV I use has both HDMI and DVI so even if HDMI that I am currently using doesnt work out, I can easily switch to DVI. I just need to fork up the cash for a long enough DVI cable if that turns out to be the case.

[artivision]

1.) ofc the GPU internally can execute any form of shaders as long as it use supported by the hardware opcodes
2.) well my point is no game uses sse 4.2/AVX this days[maybe unreal4 but not sure yet] and the single thread performance is very relative after all most games bottlenecks are on the bandwith/GPU side more than the CPU and in some others the CPU do affect the max framerate but normally the FPS is high enough to not care, so this days for most games the CPU point is moot unless you wanna break a Bench record or play with multimonitors in 3D[which neither is properly supported in linux yet]
3.) i am and those timings are insanely high you probably have a huge time eater in your code unrelated to the to hlsl-glsl
4.) again my point the wine performance is close enough but wine is already exploring an option to have an external hlsl compiler especially for DX10/11 http://wiki.winehq.org/HLSLCompiler but again the current wine implementation for Dx9 can handle very well very taxing games like crysis 2 in very high settings fluid enough for me not to care.
5.) handle the gpu directly is probably not a good idea at all

here you can see how wine shaders work http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectX-Shaders

Your comments are somehow unrelated.

1) Good single thread CPU performance for Wine, is related with GLSL translations. With an SSSE3 Core2 Pentium (3.6dmips/mhz) at 3Ghz, you can't have more than 30fps to the majority of new games and regardless of the GPU.

2) Wines todays translation approach has only 60-80% the frame rate, with a powerful and compatible system, as i said before. And that without dead corners (something valid for D3D is invalid for OGL). Not +-10%, don't say that again, you may confuse people.

3) The only reason that we can't connect MS-DirectX and a GPU via Wine, is that Linux drivers don't have a target library for DirecX. They only have an LLVM target back-end for their OpenGL compiler.

[Nille]

can subtitles be used with the video accel? What about ASS subtitles, in addition to normal ones?

This has nothing todo with the Video Acceleration. Its only an Overlay.

[duby229]

Your TV supports HDCP, but it should also operate without an encrypted connection. Otherwise, how would you hook up an older HDMI-based DVD player (or anything with component/composite cables)? As a general rule, TVs support HDCP, but they don't require it in most cases. Usually it's the device actually producing/playing the content that would refuse to produce output if HDCP isn't required (such as a Bluray player).

In the case of a HTPC with a radeon hooked up to a TV, HDCP is unsupported, so all of the display output is sent from your video card to the TV through an unencrypted connection. As long as you're not trying to play back encrypted Bluray discs with software that requires the encryption, you'll be fine.

Oh OK, I think I understand now. So it is the player that will dictate whether or not the content requires HDCP. Which if the content is decrypted then even that requirement could be removed.

[brosis]

@ brosis

Sure it is true that in many cases the OSS radeon drivers still underperform. However it is adequate to play every single game I throw at it at my monitors top resolution. If every game is playable at maximum resolution then what is the problem? I have a 4200 integrated GPU which I use primarily for watching movies and tv shows. And a 6850 discrete gpu which I use primarily for gaming. The 6850 using the OSS driver is awesome and does everything I want it to do.

Again if it does everything that it could do at a reasonable framerate then what problem is there?

6850 is discrete.. Bad thermal management and inadequate 3D performance (not abysmal though!)
I?d say - its different league.

4200 IGP is not APU, so also different league.
I have IGP from Pentium 4 and it works very well in 2D, composite and movies. Also light 3D gaming.
That on 1300x760 TV.
Youtube HTML5(forced via Youtube Anywhere Player plugin) anything more than 360p in Firefox starts to choke frames though.
Has to do with libpango, as VLC has no problems even with full HD movies. Yes, on P4.

The same league would be APUs, ie units that are purchased for office desktop, or entry level gaming desktop with medium 3D and as well as HTPC.
This includes from AMD all FM1-2 units.

[JS987]

i think the same but for some ppl winning benchmarks is more important and in that sense even if the OSS driver can output 60FPS it will suck cuz windows can push 90FPS making it unbearable, why? beats me

on the other hand APU needs some love and that is true

60 fps average isn't enough, because it means minimum will be approx. 40 fps.
There is obvious lag below 60 fps when I play games. 90 fps average is necessary for 60 fps minimum.

[brosis]

60 fps average isn't enough, because it means minimum will be approx. 40 fps.
There is obvious lag below 60 fps when I play games. 90 fps average is necessary for 60 fps minimum.

AMD APUs on opensource driver usually stuck at 10-30 fps.
So, I don?t get what you guys are discussing.

[jrch2k8]

Your comments are somehow unrelated.

1) Good single thread CPU performance for Wine, is related with GLSL translations. With an SSSE3 Core2 Pentium (3.6dmips/mhz) at 3Ghz, you can't have more than 30fps to the majority of new games and regardless of the GPU.

2) Wines todays translation approach has only 60-80% the frame rate, with a powerful and compatible system, as i said before. And that without dead corners (something valid for D3D is invalid for OGL). Not +-10%, don't say that again, you may confuse people.

3) The only reason that we can't connect MS-DirectX and a GPU via Wine, is that Linux drivers don't have a target library for DirecX. They only have an LLVM target back-end for their OpenGL compiler.

1.) good single thread performance is always welcome and the same is true for windows but im pretty sure in many games like Resident Evil 5/crysis 1 for example my old Phenom II X2[no OC] reached at least 40 pushing all the settings at 720p some im sure is pretty dependant of your setup
2.) Wine has reached for me close to 95% parity in many games like lineage2 Tauti or last half life title or devil may cry 4 but i agree it can vary a lot depending your system but the same is true on windows.
3.) nope, only r600g have an experimental LLVM backend and no commercial driver has it either[LLVM i mean] and either way is not that simple cuz Wine could today implement a direct TGSI pass and forget the conversion but then only Gallium drivers would work or use direct GPU ASM so any GPU would work but prolly at the cost of new 5 million LoC and beyond all that you still need to parse and run basic security/stability checks[this is done by windows too at driver level] and even so Windows drivers have a bazillion of hacks to improve performance in selected games due to ultra crappy routines/spec violations/by hand slow ASM that game studios never fixes[especially unreal]. So even if you literally grab the entire DX code and hook it directly to the GPU most games would still be slower than windows just because the driver don't have the optimization made by hand that are present on windows drivers over the years

[curaga]

This has nothing todo with the Video Acceleration. Its only an Overlay.

?

Sure it does, some acceleration techniques prevent subtitles from being used at all (old-style video overlay - you can't read it back, you can't render over it).