VDPAU Video Playback For The Radeon RX Vega On Linux

[TheLexMachine]

AFAIK, Vega was designed long after Kaby Lake was locked down and since Intel doesn't do anything radical with their architectures - they just shrink things for the most part - and has more resources than AMD or Nvidia, it's easier for Intel to implement new things into their decoders.

[shmerl]

Ask Sir Bridgeman. I think it was probably the fact that AMD was in a bit of a crisis and had to focus on the important things. Technically speaking, AMD sold all the video decoder stuff to Broadcom back in 2006, so they lost the personnel and R&D that ATI had built up for years. Had they kept it, I think they would have had a much better IP portfolio and resources to handle today's multi-media landscape. Back then, ATI cards were very much considered the Go-To choice for XP media center PCs and they had the whole CableCard thing going for them too, at least until AMD cut that shit off.

I see. But how is this hybrid decoder supposed to be used then? When I check vainfo / vdpauinfo for Polaris (RX 480), there is no trace of VP9, while it supposedly should also have that hybrid decoding support.

[Gusar]

Seems interesting, but is there any video player which supports or plans to support omx decode?

Gstreamer. And even it has to be adjusted to make OMX Tizonia work. Because OMX is just that awesome - you need to specifically support each vendor implementation. That's why only Gstreamer (and partly VLC) bother with it. No one uses it. It's the main thing on Android, but no application there uses OMX directly, they use higher-level interfaces provided by Google, specifically Mediacodec, which then interfaces with OMX somewhere in the many layers of abstraction that is the Android media stack. (btw, Android versions of VLC, Kodi and mpv all use Mediacodec).

vaapi-egl interop is a better bet than omx on Desktop Linux, but you'll have to wait for libva-2.0. It's not AMD's fault that there's no vaapi-egl yet, libva is designed too much around how Intel hardware works, but there is a proposal for a more flexible interface in libva-2.0 which will make egl interop on AMD possible.

[TheLexMachine]

I see. But how is this hybrid decoder supposed to be used then? When I check vainfo / vdpauinfo for Polaris (RX 480), there is no trace of VP9, while it supposedly should also have that hybrid decoding support.

I couldn't tell ya. I'm not a developer, but what I can tell you is that it only sort of works on Windows, based on what I've seen. Google's unstable version of Chrome has VP9 decoding improvements from what I've read and that probably doesn't carry over to the Linux version. Unfortunately, VP9 currently only has solid decoding on mobile devices because it was originally intended to be used on those and the chip makers and other associated companies moved quickly to get it into the GPUs and make hybrid decoders a reality. I think VP9 will be like H.264 in that it will have been around for a long time before anyone actually gets decoding of it working well on a PC GPU. By the time that happens, VP9 will have been replaced by the new royalty-free codec, which will probably start the cycle of pain all over again.

[andrei_me]

Off-topic:

CUVID

As a portuguese speaker, I love CUDA name because "cu" is a$$ in portuguese, "da" is "give", so any project that involves cuda usually have "cu" in the middle

[holunder]

No, vdpau is tied to X, i heard it works with xwayland though. VAAPI on the other hand does work with wayland, but currently only with intel hardware, AMD's gallium based vaapi implementation lacks the necessary egl interop.

There is an option to still use GLX in MPV: opengl-hwdec-interop=vaapi-glx. See here and here. I can play up to 4K 400 MBit/s H.265 10 bit content on my RX 580.
Edit: But this doesn’t mean it works on Wayland, my fault.

[legume]

There is an option to still use GLX in MPV: opengl-hwdec-interop=vaapi-glx. See here and here. I can play up to 4K 400 MBit/s H.265 10 bit content on my RX 580.
Edit: But this doesn’t mean it works on Wayland, my fault.

Ahh, thanks, I didn't know that one - so my concern there was wrong.
A bit of messing around I guess to replicate the "shortcut" convinience of all the options --vo=opengl-hq transparently enabled , but --target-trc=srgb does work as before with that (which is mainly what I would only have missed anyway).

Edit: on wayland I wasn't realy concerned about that - last time I tried weston any fullscreen video got trashed by some tiling issue, the patch for which got "discussed" to death. Maybe things are different now, it was a while ago.

[agd5f]

Maybe we should put more hope into the OMX tizonia port.
https://singhcodes.wordpress.com/201...-and-eglimage/
https://singhcodes.wordpress.com/201...-phase-starts/

That's OpenMAX, not VA-API. VA-API would need something similar.

[agd5f]

Ok, thanks for the confirmation.

BTW: Amongst the many interesting commit messages in your amd-staging-drm-next tree (which I currently run to enjoy HDMI 2 support) I spotted one regarding HDR10 signaling: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/...28243e6f41b64a

Is it way too early to ask for this, or is there already preliminary support for emitting an HDR signal via HDMI? If so, how would one configure the X11 server to make use of it?

X needs a pretty major rework to handle HDR. There are discussions on how to support it happening now on the xorg-devel mailing list. So at this point, DC can handle it, but we'd need to plumb the rest of the stack.

[agd5f]

Seems interesting, but is there any video player which supports or plans to support omx decode?

gstreamer supports omx so anything that uses gstreamer should be able to take advantage of it.