AMD Lands OpenMAX State Tracker In Mesa Gallium3D

The OpenMAX state tracker has appeared within Gallium3D in Mesa for another means of exposing MPEG2 and H.264 acceleration on the GPU.

Back in October was when AMD unveiled the OpenMAX Gallium3D state tracker. OpenMAX is a Khronos cross-platform, royalty-free media acceleration API. AMD's Gallium3D driver can take advantage of OpenMAX for H.264 and MPEG4 video acceleration using the Unified Video Decoder (UVD) block. AMD has already been exposing open-source UVD video acceleration via the VDPAU state tracker, but AMD went ahead and developed the OpenMAX state tracker for other purposes -- to eventually support video acceleration and also in providing H.264 Hi10P decode support that wasn't offered in VDPAU.

Earlier this week is when AMD open-sourced VCE video engine code for their newer "CIK" graphics processors. The OpenMAX state tracker will eventually be able to support video encoding/transcoding on the open-source AMD driver stack once those new VCE bits are to land.

With Mesa 10.1 now having been branched and Mesa 10.2 under development, Christian König has finally committed the OpenMAX state tracker to mainline Mesa. He wrote, "Featuring a full grown MPEG2 and H264 decoder and a couple of hundred bugs." This state tracker to complement the existing VDPAU support in Gallium3D adds over two thousand lines of new code to Mesa.

On a semi-related note, the Radeon UVD legal notes were updated too, which could potentially impact some with US government restricted rights and now the UVD code is advertising it's subject to export restrictions.