It's nice that Phoronix keeps us up to date on our FOSS heroes. I hope Luc finds employment soon. I heard there's an opening at ATI...
Phoronix: XvMC Comes To xf86-video-unichrome Driver
Earlier this year Luc Verhaegen, one of the key contributors to the RadeonHD graphics driver, was laid off from Novell after a round of cutbacks at their German facility. While remaining unemployed, Luc has contributed to the CoreBoot project with ATI graphics card flashing support and native VGA text mode support, among other work...
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzY3NQ
It's nice that Phoronix keeps us up to date on our FOSS heroes. I hope Luc finds employment soon. I heard there's an opening at ATI...
So...
He implemented XvMC in a manner that is 1) incompatible with existing assumptions about the implementation of XvMC, and 2) is limited to a driver for hardware that hardly anyone uses.
What exactly does this accomplish?
I can probably answer that one... info is available to program the video decode hardware on the Via chip but not on our chip.
???
I implemented unichrome MPEG2 hardware slice decoding acceleration. I wrote a tiny X protocol to feed the mpeg data into the part of the driver that feeds that data into the hardware. The tiny X protocol was not the goal, it was a tool to function as a back-end for the unichrome XvMC client library, and it will not grow beyond this driver.
Why you think this involves other drivers is beyond me.
Honestly I'm not a programmer. I really dont know how those things work. Being a radeon user though, and your experience with ATi hardware, and clearly your experience with XvMC would seem like a logical choice.
I guess I could more appropriately phrase my question as "Why implement XvMC in unichrome when it would serve a whole lot more people to implement it in radeon?"