AMD Open-Sources Advanced Media Framework, But No Linux Support Yet

AMD this week open-sourced the Advanced Media Framework (AMF) as their replacement to the earlier AMD Media SDK. But before getting too excited about this latest AMD open-source project, there isn't yet any Linux support.

AMD's AMF is self-described as, "a light-weight, portable multimedia framework that abstracts away most of the platform and API-specific details and allows for easy implementation of multimedia applications using a variety of technologies, such as DirectX 11, OpenGL, and OpenCL and facilitates an efficient interop between them." Another description puts it as "The AMF SDK allows optimization of application performance by utilizing CPU, GPU compute shaders and hardware accelerators for media processing. These optimizations are applicable to a wide range of applications such as gaming or content creation. Programming of AMD Video Engines (UVD and VCE blocks) is also an important part of the functionality that AMF provides to developers."

AMD AMF is designed for AMD GCN GPUs and newer. This media framework is developed under the MIT license. With OpenGL and OpenCL support being targeted and AMF also making use of FFmpeg, hopefully we'll see it ported to Linux -- if not by AMD, the open-source community. Would be nice to see more cross-platform work in the video acceleration department between Windows and Linux.

The project's samples directory shows off hardware accelerated video playback, simple video decoders/encoders/converters, and more with AMF. The code is hosted on GitHub and there's also the GPUOpen page.