UVD Is Enabled For Linux In Catalyst 8.10

With Canonical publishing the ATI Catalyst 8.10 driver even before it's been announced by AMD or appearing on their driver download page, we've taken this opportunity for an early look at this next Linux driver. In early September we confirmed XvMC and UVD are coming to ATI's Linux driver and that it would be enabled in the October driver. Looking at the default AMDPCSDB (AMD Persistent Configuration Driver Store Data-Base) in this driver for Ubuntu 8.10 there is indeed the Unified Video Decoder (2) option and it's enabled.

The UvdEnabled switch in the amdpcsdb.default has been changed from 0 to 1, which means it's enabled. However, using it is a different story. In the XvBAW library are several strings pertaining to XvMC and in AMDXvBA are several references to UVD. We have been trying out different things for the past few hours along with using the XvMC wrapper to get just the X-Video Motion Compensation support working for mplayer, but so far it's been to no avail.

We'll continue trying out this latest driver and look for more information surrounding UVD on Linux once Catalyst 8.10 has been officially released.