Nouveau "NVC0" Gets Accelerated Video Decoding

[Paradox Ethereal]

Congrats to the noveau-team. Indeed when buying hardware, one should be able to program it, and not be locked into OS choice. Incredible lame of NVIDIA not to release specs. Peace Be With You.

[MuPuF]

That would be a nice start if nVidia would allow the firmware to be redistributed (unmodified in any way of course) so it could be included in the debian firmware-linux-nonfree package for example

Wonder if anyone has approached nVidia about that idea?

We actually thought about that but no-one took the time to write an email yet. If you want to write it and forward it to us, feel free to

[DeepDayze]

Can not you just get permission from Nvidia for redistribution of firmware?

I mean, its useless for anyone BUT for Nvidia GPU owners.

It still will not be FOSS, but nobody would have to digg into proprietary driver in order to get it working.

That would be a nice start if nVidia would allow the firmware to be redistributed (unmodified in any way of course) so it could be included in the debian firmware-linux-nonfree package for example

Wonder if anyone has approached nVidia about that idea?

[przemoli]

Can not you just get permission from Nvidia for redistribution of firmware?

I mean, its useless for anyone BUT for Nvidia GPU owners.

It still will not be FOSS, but nobody would have to digg into proprietary driver in order to get it working.

[pingufunkybeat]

Wow, kudos again to the nouveau devs!

I've gotta say, the first time I heard about nouveau many many years ago when it was still in its infancy I thought "cool project, but the devs will probably get tired fast and it will be yet another possibly cool thing that never was". How glad I am to be proven wrong again and again, you rock!

Agreed!

It seemed hopeless to me. How wrong I was!

[[Knuckles]]

Wow, kudos again to the nouveau devs!

I've gotta say, the first time I heard about nouveau many many years ago when it was still in its infancy I thought "cool project, but the devs will probably get tired fast and it will be yet another possibly cool thing that never was". How glad I am to be proven wrong again and again, you rock!

[HokTar]

Sure, but ... that's not really fully-FOSS.

Well, I hate to stay it, but even this would make me quite happy with my radeon... hdmi audio on aruba, too.

[Ericg]

Sure, but ... that's not really fully-FOSS.

Baby steps man, baby steps

[MuPuF]

But at the end, if firmwares are extracted, we will have VDPAU decoding with FOSS nouveau, right?

Sure, but ... that's not really fully-FOSS.

[Drago]

Guys, sorry to disappoint, but this is neither new nor ready. What is released is the kernel + userspace for video decoding (VDPAU IIRC).

Most of the work is left to be done. This work is reverse engineering most video-decoding microcodes and then re-implement that. FYI, this is like re-implementing ffmpeg (not everything, but a lot of it) in asm. The amount of code to be written is tremendous, several orders of magnitude bigger than what is needed to get 3D hw acceleration. Until then, you'll have to extract your video decoding firmwares yourself.

But at the end, if firmwares are extracted, we will have VDPAU decoding with FOSS nouveau, right?