DRI3 Support Lands In Gallium3D's Video Code

[juno]

I'm also highly confused by this. Why are there VDPAU, VA-API, OMX? What software does really utilise AMD UVD, VCE, Nvidia NVENC, PureVideo and Intel's de-/encooder?
Is there any api that works cross-vendor, cross-platform for video stuff just like OpenGL for 3D graphics? Is there any app/lib that works for all?

Also, as we are speaking about AMD here, is there any table or overview for uvd/vce versions and their capabilities? Sure, there are the introducing pages

http://developer.amd.com/community/blog/2014/02/19/introducing-video-coding-engine-vce/

http://developer.amd.com/community/blog/2014/02/19/introducing-unified-video-decoder-uvd/

But these are not very helpful. I'm thinking of a table stating which codec with which bitrate, resolution, refresh rate etc. is supported by which GPU/APU.

[Mez']

Lately, VDPAU has been working like a charm in SMPLAYER or VLC. I remember it was kind of a mess a few years back. I can finally play 1080p 6 channels videos with a smooth playback now that I rediscovered it. Even better if DRI3 improves it yet a tad more.

That and the deactivation of flash + activation of hardware acceleration in Firefox, and the difference in watching videos is night and day!

[bridgman]

Also, as we are speaking about AMD here, is there any table or overview for uvd/vce versions and their capabilities?

No matter what the question, the answer is often "look in RadeonFeature":

https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index8h2

It doesn't have bitrate or resolution x refresh info but IIRC those aren't really simple numbers unless they're used to describe behaviour with some kind of reference bitstream. I could be wrong there though.

[drSeehas]

...

https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index8h2

...

So Topaz doesn't have UVD Hardware?

[bridgman]

Generally the chips intended for pairing with an iGPU don't include UVD, since video decoding can be done on the iGPU more efficiently and more securely. Not 100% sure that is the case for Topaz but it's what I would expect.

[nanonyme]

VA-API is Intel's solution to Video decoding, and encoding, on Linux.

VDPAU is Nvidia's (and now AMD's) decoding, but not encoding, API for Unix-like operating systems.

There's also OpenMAX, which is a Khronos(of OpenGL, Vulkan, and OpenCL fame) API for encoding and decoding.

There's XvBA, which was AMD's Catalyst encode-decode API, but very little software actually supports that.

I thought AMD OSS drivers supported the first three so you can basically throw any video player at them and get same results. OMX is less tested and probably more buggy on AMD though

[legume]

Did anybody try OMX with x86? I only used that with my Raspberry Pi (there you can use OMX or MMAL).

Works with gstreamer OK for me. Can decode as well as encode. Fixed params only for encode AFAIK aims for constant quality so bitrate variable according to input complexity, constrained baseline output.

[legume]

Did anybody try OMX with x86? I only used that with my Raspberry Pi (there you can use OMX or MMAL).

Try 2 stupid forum seems to have eaten try 1.

Yea works for decode and encode.

[twriter]

I thought AMD OSS drivers supported the first three [VA-API, VDPAU, OpenMAX] so you can basically throw any video player at them and get same results.

That's the idea. We try to provide as broad support as possible. VDPAU is the oldest Linux video acceleration API and the only one supported by Adobe's Flash plugin, if you care about that sort of thing.

OMX is less tested and probably more buggy on AMD though

Our gst-omx testing has focused on single and multi-stream file-to-file transcoding of H.264 and MPEG2 so those use cases should work well but I agree that OpenMAX is not so widely used on desktop Linux and is less well tested than VDPAU and VA-API. For video playback, VDPAU and VA-API are recommended.

[twriter]

I'm also highly confused by this. Why are there VDPAU, VA-API, OMX? What software does really utilise AMD UVD, VCE, Nvidia NVENC, PureVideo and Intel's de-/encooder?
Is there any api that works cross-vendor, cross-platform for video stuff just like OpenGL for 3D graphics? Is there any app/lib that works for all?

Most developers use a higher level multimedia framework such as FFmpeg or GStreamer. FFmpeg supports VDPAU and VA-API but not OMX (as far as I recall). GStreamer supports all three. It's important to understand that not all APIs support all capabilities of the hardware and not all frameworks expose all capabilities of the underlying API. For example, VDPAU doesn't support encoding, VA-API supports encoding but FFmpeg did not support it until recently, etc.