HEVC/H.265 Video Decode Is Present In VDPAU For AMDGPU

[phoronix]

Phoronix: HEVC/H.265 Video Decode Is Present In VDPAU For AMDGPU

Recently there was a question by a Phoronix reader whether H.265/HEVC GPU-based video decode would be supported by the new AMDGPU driver stack on supported hardware. There is indeed the support in place with the latest Git of the open-source AMD Linux driver code...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=VDPAU-HEVC-AMDGPU

[hajj_3]

there isn't even full hardware decode of vp9 in intel's new skylake platform

[wiak]

they have VP8 support in Fiji, so its only VP9 thats MIA

[Azrael5]

What kind of browser support h.265 format and youtube has videos h.265?

[89c51]

HW acceleration sucks a bit on r600 radeon. Hopefully they'll get their act together and give us accelerated VP9. (4k + vp9 + decent power management = will buy)

[Gusar]

What kind of browser support h.265 format and youtube has videos h.265?

No browser supports it right now, and it's possible none ever will. The licensing fee is just too high ($25 million per year, compared to $5 million for h264; and that's not including the new HEVC Advance patent pool which has no annual cap, meaning you could easily reach $100 million and more).

There's always the workaround of delegating decoding to a system media framework (like what Firefox does for h264), but even that requires some glue code in the browser, and I'm not aware of any browser having it. Maybe Microsoft Edge, but it's doubtful, considering Win10 doesn't come with a h265 decoder - it seems not even Microsoft wants to pay the licensing fee.

As for Youtube, I don't see it getting h265, they'll focus on using VP9 of 4k videos, while all other videos are h264/vp8/vp9.

HW acceleration sucks a bit on r600 radeon. Hopefully they'll get their act together and give us accelerated VP9. (4k + vp9 + decent power management = will buy)

It isn't about getting one's act together, hardware is needed. No AMD hardware currently has VP9 decoding, not even Fiji and Carrizo. PC hardware in general is a bit poor in this department. Intel had VP9 decoding only on Cherryview/Braswell, but not on Skylake. Nvidia has it on the GTX960, but it's exposed only via nvcuvid, not via vdpau.

Then there's the software side, no browser currently has proper hardware decoding support, for any codec. There's a patch for Chromium to enable VAAPI, but last time I tried it it didn't work.

Edit; Hmm, I'm actually not sure about Cherryview/Braswell, there's no vp9 code in libva-intel-driver. I found this though: https://github.com/01org/intel-hybrid-driver <- hybrid vp9 decoding for Intel hardware. Interesting. Very interesting. I wasn't aware someone is bothering with hybrid decoders on Linux.

[DanL]

HW acceleration sucks a bit on r600 radeon.

Not really sure what you mean. I'm using r600 on a UVD 2.2 card and the decode acceleration works well enough for what the hardware supports.

[joh22n]

Does somebody have an idea of why the HW VP9 support is taking so long? IIRC the spec was finalized somewhere mid 2013, so over 2 years ago. Is it that after the spec is ready it just takes a long time to implement in hardware which means HEVC spec was ready before VP9?

[Gusar]

Does somebody have an idea of why the HW VP9 support is taking so long? IIRC the spec was finalized somewhere mid 2013, so over 2 years ago. Is it that after the spec is ready it just takes a long time to implement in hardware which means HEVC spec was ready before VP9?

There is no VP9 spec.

HEVC was formally released April 2013, but as it's an open standard, drafts were available before that. Even so, we're only getting HEVC decoders now. So it seems these things just take time.

[holunder]

Can please someone confirm that it works with Tonga too? Would be completely new to me that Tonga already supported H.265 decoding. But would be pretty awesome! I don't know where I have to look in the source to get an answer... Very interesting too: Does it support H.265 decoding in 4K UHD? The 4K Blu-ray [rips] are near!