Is there any chance to get video decoding (x264, vc1) implemented?

[Alex Deucher]

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 7:03 AM, Marco Schinkel <schinkelm at web.de> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> currently is seems to be impossible to get hardware acccelerated video
> decoding with open source drivers (except broadcom bcm700xx) and all
> google search results on this topic pointed to fglrx and xvba. I wonder
> what the reason may be. Was the information needed to interface the
> decoding unit not included in the documentation that AMD released last
> year?
>
> KMS, Xvideo and even 3D is working really nice with current
> xf86-video-ati and libdrm (from git). With my 3870 and 4350 2D works
> much better with the open source drivers than with fglrx recently. A
> working vaapi is the only thing missing.
>
> I would like the radeon wiki page (http://www.x.org/wiki/radeon) and/or
> the vaapi wiki page (http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/vaapi) to
> have this topic included. I just dont have enough information to write
> something useful.
>

R1xx-r5xx GPUs use the 3D engine to accelerate video decode.
r1xx-r2xx have a special video mode in the 3D engine and r3xx-r5xx use
shaders.  R6xx+ have a decoder block (UVD), but they could also use
shaders to implement video decode just like the previous chips.  All
of the info needed for a shader-based implementation is available:
http://www.x.org/docs/AMD
http://developer.amd.com/gpu/ATIStreamSDK/ATIStreamSDKv1.4Beta/Pages/default.aspx
http://developer.amd.com/gpu/ATIStreamSDK/pages/Documentation.aspx
But at the moment, no one has done the implementation.  We are
investigating if we can release any information about UVD, but there
are potential problems due to the drm requirements of other systems.

Alex

> Does anyone know more about this? I assume there are licensing problems
> involved again.
>
>
> Best regards
>
> Marco Schinkel
> _______________________________________________
> xorg-driver-ati mailing list
> xorg-driver-ati at lists.x.org
> http://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-driver-ati
>