Ubuntu 16.04 Still Isn't Shipping With VDPAU, VA-API or OpenCL By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 16.04 Still Isn't Shipping With VDPAU, VA-API or OpenCL By Default

While playing around with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS this weekend in its current development state, I was a bit surprised to see that this next Ubuntu release still isn't shipping with VDPAU, VA-API, or OpenCL support by default...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-16.04-Adv-Gfx-Defaults

[chithanh]

[d2kx]

Complete joke.

[SpyroRyder]

Lazy on the part of ubuntu. Them not shipping the MP3 codec is understandable but this and for the reason of just a few megabytes is just the worst. Be like Linux mint and aim for a DVD size these days. DVD's are pretty cheap and I haven't seen many USB's for sale that are less than 2 gig.

[Michael]

Another silly thing is that they no longer even package POCL

[boffo]

Lazy on the part of ubuntu. Them not shipping the MP3 codec is understandable but this and for the reason of just a few megabytes is just the worst. Be like Linux mint and aim for a DVD size these days. DVD's are pretty cheap and I haven't seen many USB's for sale that are less than 2 gig.

Are there still people using dvds?

[ssokolow]

Are there still people using dvds?

All the time, for many reasons:

1. For installation media or for recovery media for potentially compromised systems, rewritability is a bug. (ie. I always use write-once, read-many media for my Live CD and installation media. Even if I'm booting off it, I still want to know that it can't have been accidentally changed since I verified the SHA-1 at burn time.)

2. The cost of a high-quality DVD+R, when bought in bulk, is 50¢ or less, even when you amortize the cost of a cheap DVD burner over the course of its usable lifetime. The base cost for a thumbdrive dwarfs that, regardless of capacity, which makes them a poor choice for one-off things you're going to give away.

3. For bulk storage, DVD+Rs are cheaper than flash memory and, in case of failure, a good Taiyo Yuden DVD+R is much more recovery-friendly than a rotating rust drive. (eg. At a comparable price per megabyte, dying mechanisms or electronics in a single drive will kill hundreds of gigabytes until an expensive specialist can be called in. For DVD+Rs, just spend another $20-30 on a new DVD burner. Also, dvdisaster makes it easy to augment an ISO with ECC at a level which protects the filesystem structures too.)

[ernstp]

Just stumbled upon this bug "VA-API implementation for gallium missing" https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...a/+bug/1481832
Saw that Alex Deucher had commented.

[tjaalton]

For starters:

- opencl would need clang in main, which is not going to happen before it supports libstdc++ abi
- va-api has been buggy on the default video player (totem)
- defaulting to something that pulls in libva would mean moving ffmpeg and it's 30+ dependency packages in main.. good luck writing MIR's for those


and pocl needs someone to care about the package not building https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pocl

[mao_dze_dun]

From a more everyday user point of view - I recently came to learn the pain of using VDPAU with AMD hardware in Linux. I got a pair of fancy Powerline Adapters for my birthday last month, so I decided to turn my old PC, which I've "intended to sell" for about 8 months (i.e. it collected dust under my second desk), into a media/Steam Machine PC. Well, it turns out there is no sane way of making the closed source driver to do VDPAU decoding. So, I opted for the open source driver - fortunately Oibaf has us covered. But it turns out Steam, as a 32bit application, cannot work with the 64bit libraries. Thus I installed the 32bit dependencies as well. And it broke. Finally, at the advice of my boss, I just used 32bit Ubuntu and behold - it worked.
Oh, Linux, some say you shall conquer the world, but I'm just happy when you boot into a desktop environment after a Mesa update )).

PS The "good" news is AMD encoding with Steam In-home-streaming is completely broken on Windows, as well. Which means I can finally use that iGPU for something *winning*.