Radeon Driver Gets Reworked Textured Video

[bugmenot]

This is exposed as an Xv adaptor, so you shouldn't have to do anything as mplayer and most other video players try to use Xv by default.

Thanks, that's what I wanted to hear.

[bridgman]

The only think to consider is that if bicubic filtering is enabled then these new attributes won't be available. Here's the latest I could find on turning bicubic off -- looks like it's controlled by *another* attribute :

"You can disable it on the fly using the XV_BICUBIC Xv attribute. You can use an app like xvattr to change Xv attributes."

Last I remember is that bicubic is enabled by default on 3xx-5xx hardware. I'm pretty sure about 5xx, less sure about 3xx-4xx.

[agd5f]

yeah, XV_BICUBIC is only available on r3xx-r5xx. To disable it, run:
xvattr -a XV_BICUBIC -v 0 -p <port>
where <port> is the textured video port you want to disable bicubic on. You can see the ports with xvinfo or xvattr.

[greg]

While this video acceleration is not ideal as say VDPAU, VA-API, or even just XvMC it will certainly be appreciated by ATI customers.

Can you really call Xv video acceleration? I don't think so.

[Zhick]

Can you really call Xv video acceleration? I don't think so.

Of course it's video acceleration. Actually it's pretty much the biggest chunk of acceleration that needs to be done, the rendering.
What it's not is video-decode acceleration.

btw, great work @ all involved

[bridgman]

Can you really call Xv video acceleration? I don't think so.

You can't call it video *decode* acceleration (since it only covers the *render* portion of the playback stack) but as Zhick said Xv makes a huge difference in CPU utilization during video playback and can also improve video quality along the way (by doing processing which the CPU would not be able to handle).

[greg]

You can't call it video *decode* acceleration

And that's exactly why I think it's really irritating to call it "video acceleration", which nowadays is more or less synonymous with decode acceleration. I think I've never seen anyone call Xv "video acceleration" before.

[bridgman]

Wierd... my experience has been exactly the opposite... I don't think I've ever seen "video acceleration" refer exclusively to decode.

VDPAU, VA-API and XvBA are all decode+render APIs.

Maybe you're thinking about it from a "news" perspective ? If render acceleration was already available, and then decode+render acceleration is announced, the "new part" is decode ?

[chrisr]

The textured video changes also cover all of the radeon generations so went into -ati as well.

Something's not right - I've installed the latest ATI driver from git on my R100 machine (which doesn't have bicubic filtering), and the only Xv attributes that Textured Video ports have is XV_SYNC.

[bridgman]

Yeah, I was just looking in the tree and it seems Roland started with 2xx, not 1xx. I just asked agd5f for clarification on IRC..

OK, that was a D'oh!! moment... the attribute processing is done in shaders, and the R100 family doesn't really have what we call shaders today.