What Will Happen To xf86-video-nv In 2010?

[yotambien]

Things happen because ppl want them to happen, if we don't have tearfree video on open source drivers its not because nobody knows how to do it, its because nobody considers it worth doing.

Except, of course, that you are wrong, unless what you meant was "nobody who would be able to do it considers it worth doing".

For example at Red Hat we can't ship a DVD player with our OS, so why the hell would we invest money in tearfree movie playing? Most Linux users playing movie are playing dodgy legal rips of content from other sources, its not something we get much paying customer demand for at all.

As a linux user I find that last comment completely out of line. This is the kind of thing I would expect to read from the worst trolls in places like the linuxhater blog, not from an X developer. Interestingly, 'most linux users' is not a category you consider yourself included in. On the other hand, I appreciate the honesty in the first part of the paragraph, and I don't mean it in an ironic way. It's always refreshing to hear from an insider how things work and what drives development; if this was done more often many people would have a more realistic view of what this is about.

Which video codec do you use to encode your video? If it's anything but MJPEG or Theora, it's probably patented in a way that makes it impossible to ship in free distros. Which audio codec? Better hope it's Vorbis, or maybe Speex.

This has nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with software patents.

Should we then interpret under a new light bridgman's comments about how GPU offloading of some stages of video playback will possibly be implemented in shaders under Gallium? A Speex-accelerated box is not what was in my mind.

I don't think Desktop use has ever really been a focus of Nvidia's.

So how do you read the fact that desktop oriented features like video acceleration were implemented by Nvidia in the linux driver? (not only that, but they were also the first ones, and doing a good job at it) Or what about the fact that the most used cards in linux seem to be Nvidia? Or that Nvidia support for newer kernels and X servers is usually implemented rather quickly? (mind you, business users are not the ones constantly upgrading their systems)

So you hope ATI gets a monopoly. That's real smart isn't it. But saying peace and freedom comes from the extermination of others is not a new concept to your country is it?

The guy is a pain, but that wasn't the most fortunate of your almost always sharp and interesting comments, Mr Deanjo.

[MostAwesomeDude]

You really are reaching for straws here. You guys have already accepted vdpau and va-api into the fold. You guys are providing access to the capabilities, what xyz decoder group does with it really isn't of your concern nor holds you liable. It does not matter if you do it through propriatary engines or open standards and solutions such as openCL (no matter if they are less efficient then addressing hw specific solutions as long as they are more efficient then current raw power cpu) providing a desirable end user experience as long as it's a feature that truly can the "make or break" difference. If you want, absolutely go ahead and accelerate things like Theora and Dirac. At least then your providing users with a reasonable alternative but alas no real such effort has been made (except again on nvidia hardware in the case of dirac). If your going to worry about potential illegal uses you might as well get rid of every debugger, every compiler, every piece of hardware support as pretty much every aspect of computing can be used in "illegal" practices.

Who are "you guys" here? Dave was pointing out that Fedora (alongside Debian and other large distros) doesn't ship non-free codecs. What actually gets accelerated in Gallium doesn't matter, although the distro maintainers have already emphasized that we need to provide compile-time flags to let them turn off the patented stuff.

I, personally, as an amateur, would not mind implementing all kinds of video codecs, but I have better (read: paid!) things to do, and so does everybody else working on this code, with the possible exception of Younes.

So, really, if you want this feature, just like with all other features, you can either donate code that makes it happen, or you can wait for somebody to get paid to do it. Until those goddamn patents go away, you can bet on the former.

[tball]

Try to play HD content in linux on a laptop with a non-vdpau capable system and then play it on a vdpau system. I dare you to compare the battery life and playback experience. Same goes with HTPC's where efficient quiet cooling is desired where playback of HD content as well as doing a plethora of other tasks such as realtime recording during HD playback. Such a task is well beyond the capability of non accelerated HD playback but is perfectly capable of doing so with a low end dual core (single core if not encoding to HD) and a vdpau card.

Dude seriously :-) Why would I unplug my laptop from the power supply when seeing a movie? With my power supply plugged in with my core 2 duo cpu, I am completely satisfied with the movie experience.

What I am more concerned about, is my ability to switch my plasma tv on and off as I want with xrandr.

[dfx.]

- NVIDIA begins contributing basic support for new hardware to the Nouveau driver. This, of course, would be ideal.

How's that "ideal" ?

You know what ideal ? Specs !
This is called "realistic".

- NVIDIA just outright quits committing any code at all to the xf86-video-nv driver and it goes the way of the XGI Linux driver and others.
- NVIDIA just provides no open-source contributions at all for new hardware.

And the difference between those two is ... what exactly ?

nvidia should stop being assholes and start contributing to nouveau\mesa at fullest and even change their business-model view otherwise it's going down. they already lost their chipset market, from what i heard.

it's counter-reassuring to hear ati-people saying that they looking at open-source video drivers for their hardware as nvidia-people saying they look at xf86-video-nv (like it little bitch or something for them). BUT they Provide developers with abilities, unlike nvidia.

Blobs are Must Die as "mustdie" and nouveau is a small step for video industry but huge leap for man-kind in the faces of Free Community, at least.

[Kano]

@MostAwesomeDude

Debian usually shipped with all needed codecs - only Ubuntu does not ship all needed package by default. That's the extra funny thing with Kubuntu: it has amarok which you could in theory use to play web radio streams but without mp3 support you hear just nothing live (when you don't install the needed package). decss is missing but Debian added a script to the official kaffeine package to install it. The Debian mplayer package contains a script to install win binary codecs (which are usually obsolete when you use mplayer svn, informer mainly needed for newer types of wma).

[deanjo]

Dude seriously :-) Why would I unplug my laptop from the power supply when seeing a movie? With my power supply plugged in with my core 2 duo cpu, I am completely satisfied with the movie experience.

What I am more concerned about, is my ability to switch my plasma tv on and off as I want with xrandr.

Why would you buy a laptop to have it plugged in all the time. They make desktops / nettops / etc for that which give you more capabilities for a lower price and cost of ownership.

[airlied]

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ly/037098.html

Nuff said Dave.

If you don't understand sarcasm dude I can't help you.

You honestly think my goal with that mail is to get source from nvidia?

Dave.

[airlied]

Hi Dave

I'm sorry but I feel compelled to disagree. With the advent of youtube, the likes of hulu and netflix in the US and iPlayer and 4OD (and the rest) in the UK more and more people are watching legal video on their computers

Granted this is mostly all via flash but tear free movie playing is very important. Not just to end users but to vendors that want to ship linux based devices as front ends to these services

Regards

Mike

So its just flash acceleration you want, I don't think flash supports vaapi or vdpau yet. Flash accel is done via GL, GL support is something we are working on. Again I'm sure lots of ppl want to believe they are using vdpau to watch legal content, but I'm guessing they are ripping shit left right and center. But again I've got a distro that can't ship anything to decode closed formats, so its just not worth the effort until that problem is resolved in some useful way.

We may start putting time into Theora decoding on GPU hw at some point.

Btw I'm sure if all the ppl who have real use cases for this stuff cared enough, at least one volunteer community developer would have shown up to do it, but I'm guessing they are too busy watching rips of 30 Rock or something to bother.

Dave.

[sundown]

So people watch ripped shit... who cares? It's everyday life.

[V!NCENT]

Why would you buy a laptop to have it plugged in all the time. They make desktops / nettops / etc for that which give you more capabilities for a lower price and cost of ownership.

Core 2 Duo laptops are not meant to be used on your lap

They are more like portale desktops.

I've always said that if I'd buy a laptop with a size larger than a netbook would buy a MacBook and install Linux on it. MacBooks are real laptops.

I mean... what good is a laptop of you can't place it on top of your lap? All laptops out there today have ventilation holes in the bottom. MacBooks are the only laptops out there that have the ventilation holes on the top.