Nouveau Receives Video Improvements

A set of patches were published this weekend to improve the Nouveau NVIDIA Gallium3D graphics driver's handling of video playback acceleration for certain scenarios.

Ilia Mirkin published a set of four Nouveau video patches on Saturday. Mirkin is the Nouveau contributor that recently got H.264 / MPEG2 video decoding to work on NVIDIA's "VP2" engine on certain NVIDIA GeForce GPUs with PureVideo video decode support. This support was merged into Linux 3.11 and the respective Nouveau Gallium3D user-space changes to improve Nouveau video acceleration.

The four patches this weekend fix things up for getting the PMPEG engine working with VDPAU, enables the XvMC video acceleration API to work with the PMPEG engine, and allows forcing PMPEG to be used for MPEG video decode to work in cases where the VP2 engine support is disabled for lack of the needed firmware from the NVIDIA binary blob.

For details on Nouveau PMPEG support is the Phoronix article on Nouveau Hardware-Based Video Support In Mesa.