NVIDIA Driver Brings PureVideo Features To Linux

[deanjo]

Hang on, did they just get what has been bragged about and promised but never delivered to us poor ATI owners or potentially future poor ATI owners? Accelerated MPEG-1, MPEG-2, H.264, and VC-1? Right about the only thing except for the availability of open source drivers that would make it worth buying ATI cards? A driver which enables smooth non-teared Linux HD playback on a $35 GeForce 8400GS video card or a $70 GeForce 8200 motherboard? With a working implementation ready to drop into Mplayer? Instead of shame and trouble, spouse approval?

Pretty much, I hate to tell people I told them so but.......

[Kano]

Well VC1/WMV3 acc is only available for a few chips like G98 / NV 9300. So you an forget that. And currently h264 does only work with very few videos out there, but at least the NV dev are working on newer profiles (right now only up to 4.1). As long as it works the cpu usage is really low - even for hd material. Now it just has to be improved. Lets see if ATI provides mplayer patches too to demonstrate their new acc libs.

[korpenkraxar]

And currently h264 does only work with very few videos out there, but at least the NV dev are working on newer profiles (right now only up to 4.1).

Well it seems like H.264 is definitely becoming the de facto standard for HD "material". Are you also referring to DivX?

As long as it works the cpu usage is really low - even for hd material.

If it enables smooth 1080p playback perhaps with some optional post processing down the line on an el cheapo card, who needs a Phenom rig with Hyper Transport 3 or similar Quad Intel rig for his (ok, or her) HD HTPC?

Lets see if ATI provides mplayer patches too to demonstrate their new acc libs.

After they wake up wondering what hit them.

[Kjella]

And currently h264 does only work with very few videos out there, but at least the NV dev are working on newer profiles (right now only up to 4.1).

It's a bit confusing, there are levels (bitrate) and profiles (encoding methods). Blu-Ray uses L4.1 High Profile, so I assume you mean to say they're only supporting some of the lesser profiles at the moment.

[Kano]

Well you can not watch for example this:

http://mirror.bigbuckbunny.de/peach/...1080p_h264.mov

[sundown]

If I were AMD, I'd be really scared.

[Vadi]

Does anyone know if this fixes the weird Qt4 rendering + compiz bug?

[DeepDayze]

If I were AMD, I'd be really scared.

At least nvidia is moving in the right direction. Perhaps the stable build will have improved PV support by then. AMD/ATI need to get their act together if they want to stay alive in the Linux space

[bugmenot]

Hm. I don't know if I should think this is a good thing. :/

nVidia tries to create an own proprietary video acceleration although there are open source approaches. Can't they thy to use something like XvMC or try to improve it or even use VA API? But AMD is not better: They made an own proprietary video driver that isn't even ready to use. Especially they should have used VAAPI or something like this.

Now nVidia and AMD have made duplicated efforts...

[myxal]

Hm. I don't know if I should think this is a good thing. :/

nVidia tries to create an own proprietary video acceleration although there are open source approaches. Can't they thy to use something like XvMC or try to improve it or even use VA API? But AMD is not better: They made an own proprietary video driver that isn't even ready to use. Especially they should have used VAAPI or something like this.

Now nVidia and AMD have made duplicated efforts...

First - am I reading something wrong? Where is it mentioned that VDPAU API is proprietary? In fact, quoting the first news article on VDPAU:

The VDPAU documentation is currently housed within a header file in /usr/include/vdpau/ that contains hundreds of lines of documentation and covers threading, extending the API, and more. VDPAU is also supported in the 180 releases of the FreeBSD and Solaris display drivers.

Doesn't read like proprietary to me :-\

XvMC is dated and plain simply doesn't offer many features essential to future video-watching experience (no frame-by-frame stepping? subtitles? no PIP? etc... WTF?).
AMD's "solution" involves essentially porting DXVA to Linux, to minimize the work needed - they have already developed the code for their windows driver, so... you can't really talk about much effort on AMD's part.

As far as API wars go, I'd like to hear someone competent look at XvBA and VDPAU and compare them. I guess if VDPAU is signifacantly better than the DXVA port, it makes sense to support it (MOAR FEATURES!!! ) Otherwise the point of maintaining two APIs and codebases (DXVA vs. VDPAU) simply escapes me.