AMD Lands OpenMAX State Tracker In Mesa Gallium3D

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Lands OpenMAX State Tracker In Mesa Gallium3D

The OpenMAX state tracker has appeared within Gallium3D in Mesa for another means of exposing MPEG2 and H.264 acceleration on the GPU...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTU5NDc

[Nille]

Very nice.

@AMD Guys

Does the fglrx Team think about openmax support too (and if not try to force them )? And much much more important is also a Windows openMax version. On Windows there is Hardware encoding only with this "open"Encode and APP available. With OpenMax i think there is maybe a better adoption.

[r1348]

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mes...f49df4d72f0856

Can anyone with legal knowledge give a bit of insight here? Does it still qualify as Free Software?

[mrugiero]

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mes...f49df4d72f0856

Can anyone with legal knowledge give a bit of insight here? Does it still qualify as Free Software?

I'm not a lawyer, but I think this part

+U.S. GOVERNMENT RESTRICTED RIGHTS: The Software is provided with "RESTRICTED
+RIGHTS." Use, duplication, or disclosure by the Government is subject to the
+restrictions as set forth in FAR 52.227-14 and DFAR252.227-7013, et seq., or
+its successor. Use of the Software by the Government constitutes
+acknowledgement of AMD's proprietary rights in them.
+
+EXPORT RESTRICTIONS: The Software may be subject to export restrictions as
+stated in the Software License Agreement.

and the requirement to own a license for the patents to use it (although that obviously don't depend on the software authors, so if it were only that it would be as free as it is actually possible) makes it non free. If the uses you can make are restricted, then it's considered non free.

[Ericg]

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mes...f49df4d72f0856

Can anyone with legal knowledge give a bit of insight here? Does it still qualify as Free Software?

The first two paragraphs just say that if you're using this driver and your graphics card suddenly catches fire and melts that you can't sue AMD or Mesa or anyone else, and that USING this driver doesnt qualify as like a contractual agreement that it works as you would expect.

The third paragraph upon reading and googling seems to be AMD telling the Government that they are welcome to use this software within the public sector as long as they acknowledge that the software is not the government's and that theres some restrictions that go along with it-- nothing that directly affects end users or probably even the project as a whole.

IANAL, but it seems like the usual disclaimer stuff for open source projects

[orzel]

Phoronix: AMD Lands OpenMAX State Tracker In Mesa Gallium3D

The OpenMAX state tracker has appeared within Gallium3D in Mesa for another means of exposing MPEG2 and H.264 acceleration on the GPU...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTU5NDc

Ok, then, how is that useful ? Does mplayer/mpv/xine or anything can make use of it ? Anybody knows how this "State tracker" is visible to the outside world ?

[pingufunkybeat]

Ok, then, how is that useful ? Does mplayer/mpv/xine or anything can make use of it ? Anybody knows how this "State tracker" is visible to the outside world ?

VLC and GStreamer support it, I'm sure some others do too.

[agd5f]

Ok, then, how is that useful ? Does mplayer/mpv/xine or anything can make use of it ? Anybody knows how this "State tracker" is visible to the outside world ?

It exposes the OpenMax API. You can use an app or framework like gstreamer that supports OpenMax to take advantage of it.

[Ericg]

It exposes the OpenMax API. You can use an app or framework like gstreamer that supports OpenMax to take advantage of it.

Hey Alex, personal opinion as well as paid developer opinion: is the over all plan to settle on strictly OpenMAX since its basically OpenGL but for video encode/decode, and eventually dump VDPAU, or are you guys just gonna try to keep both in lockstep and just tell everyone "Support Gstreamer or support VDPAU, just pick one."

On the one hand, VDPAU is the most used and stable Video API we've got on Linux at the moment. But on the other hand, it would be nice to just tell developers "Use the Khronos API's and you'll be fine, Linux follows Khronos." So that they can just follow one platform-independent standard.

Followup: Any plans to help Handbrake along to support VCE? I know they're pushing towards using Intel QuickSync so this would be a nice offset

[mrugiero]

The first two paragraphs just say that if you're using this driver and your graphics card suddenly catches fire and melts that you can't sue AMD or Mesa or anyone else, and that USING this driver doesnt qualify as like a contractual agreement that it works as you would expect.

The third paragraph upon reading and googling seems to be AMD telling the Government that they are welcome to use this software within the public sector as long as they acknowledge that the software is not the government's and that theres some restrictions that go along with it-- nothing that directly affects end users or probably even the project as a whole.

IANAL, but it seems like the usual disclaimer stuff for open source projects

Right, I misread the Gov part as being them imposing restrictions signaled to those articles (which I didn't look up for), instead of imposing those to the Gov. Anyway, the restriction is only recognition? If that's so, is pretty much as free for them as whatever license (MIT, right?) mesa uses.