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ATI Releases Linux Developers Kit
gravis777 writes, "Well, apparently ATI once again makes noise in the Linux market when they anounced yesterday that they had just released a developer's kit to support video hardware decoding (specifically for MPEG, MPEG2 and DVD) for Linux on their Rage 128 and Rage 128 Pro chips. " The new kit they are touting will "provides a software interface between the iDCT and motion compensation video acceleration of the ATI
RAGE 128[tm]-based accelerators, and MPEG-2 and DVD video playback formats."
ATi has _the_ best integrated DVD decoding of any multifunction card on the market right now. I own an ATi 128 All-in-Wonder card and its a very good card for my Linux machine. It is lacking an opensource driver but the binary one from SuSE works great. (http://www.suse.de/en/support/xsuse/). The driver is also present in lastest XFree as well (I think it's also opensourced).
The only other thing you need to make your ATi complete is the TV.... get gatos (General ATI TV and Overlay Software ATI-TV) at http://www.core.binghamton.edu/~ins omnia/gatos/
With this SDK we'll be able to combine all these features + DVD into one driver.
Awesome! I only wish other comps. did this... (*cough* nVidia *cough*)
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The VHA is designed for the Rage 128 and 128 Pro adapters. The VHA will consist of a kernel module and a user level library and will give developers access to idct and motion compensation capabilities of these chipsets. This is not a DVD player, or even an MPEG 2 player, but rather it will allow DVD and/or MPEG 2 players take advantage of ATI hardware for accelerated playback. The SDK will include some sample code for MPEG playback though. The reason this has to be binary is so that 3rd party DVD player developers can link in this library into their DVD player and protect CSS encryption. We are going to work with Loki to incorporate VHA into their SMPEG library. This will give other developers a real world example of how to use the library. When this is complete, the patches for SMPEG will be released to the community. David Johnson ATI Developer Relations
Holy sh*t! This could be the real deal... 100% legit DVD decoding on Linux! But...
Be careful, you're treading on marketing waters.
ATi has never claimed their video cards have on-board DVD decoders. What they claim is "DVD Acceleration".
What they mean by that is that there are special features of their video board that make typical mpeg2 display measurably quicker than it would be if you did not use those features.
Specifically, it has exactly what nearly every video card manufactured since 1994 has.
First, it has a bi-linear scaler so it can scale the size of the movie window in a whole two directions. Usually width and height.
Second, it has a pallete-dac that allows your software mpeg2 decoder to write YUV data to the framebuffer and have the video card convert it to RGB on the fly. This is nice, because most compressed video streams are YUV internally, and your monitor is unrelentingly RGB.
Now, these are nice things to have around, I don't deny that at all. But they do not a DVD decoder make.
Think of it like those BASF commercials - "We don't decode your DVD, we just make it better"
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Unless nvidia gets off thier collective asses and comes through with better commitment to the linux community, my next card is coming from ATI.
I have been a staunch supporter of nvidia for some time now but while companies like ATI and 3dfx have made firm commitments and provided resource after resource to the opensource community, nvidia hides behind waiting for XFree 4.0. With the news yesterday that 4.0 will be out in March, I will give nvidia until a short time past to follow through on thier commitment. If I can't see any measurable results, I will move over to ATI. Am I being unfair here?
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
ANY company which suppports Linux should be applauded for it,
./ have shown. The first product to appear is certainly going to get a lot of interest. While it is certainly very important to get DVDs onto the Linux platform, it is worrying that it is only possible with COMMERCIAL SW running on a SPECIFIC graphics card.
BUT
I think it is time to realise that the times when a companies decision to support Linux was driven by some "higher" goal is starting to end.
Linux is becoming a stratetgic platform, companies are realising that getting into the Linux market will be crucial, and it will start returning a profit in the (not to distant) future.
Especially ATI has shown in the past that it does not believe in open support for its product (yes there have been some changes, but only fairly recently).
It seems that there will be a market for a Linux DVD SW player, as countless posts on
We all know the problems most commercial drivers have, when it comes to rapidly changing kernel releases, SMP, etc.
Secondly it would tie anyone who wants to watch DVD on Linux to ATI.
Thirdly, a working closed source solution might kill (or dampen) any effort to get a more open solution, as commercial partners (which seem to be necessary, given the DVD NDA constraints, etc) might fear that the market is already occupied by ATI.
Overall I believe that ATI is mainly doing a very clever strategic move, which might end up doing more harm than good to Linux as a multimedia platform.
I still hope some company will produce a CARD INDEPENDANT DVD player app, probabely with an open interface, to enable graphics card vendors to add card specific support (not absolutely necessary, as with modern processors MPEG-2 decoding can be done entirely in SW).
IMHO this would be more helpful than any graphics card dependant solution.
And lastly let's not forget that ATI only announced the SDK, I haven't heard any product announcements yet....
Just my $0.02
Frank
For apps based on ViaVoice SDK try
Xvoice - Dictation in X
http://www.compapp.dcu.ie/~tdoris/Xvoice/
GVoice - Voice Commands for Gnome
http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~omega/gnome/gvoice/
KVoiceControl - Voice Comands for KDE
http://www.kiecza.de/daniel/kde/index.html
People have been begging Sigma Designs for information on their mpeg-2 playback engine, saying that there certainly can't be anything wrong with providing specs on that part of their DVD decoders. CSS is the only problem, right? And they come back and say "Well, but if we tell you how to do mpeg-2 playback, then you'll use css-cat to play DVDs, and that's illegal!" - which sounds like a strange argument to me... I think that basically, they're afraid that the MPAA will come down hard on them if they help open sourced DVD playback in any way.
But now ATI comes out with this same information... this is great. Hopefully others will follow. The whole thing just smacks of strong-arming by the DVD industry.
(See the "Question about MPEG playback on HW" thread on the video4linux archives - if you can find them. Red Hat - you host this list, why don't you archive it?)
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CSS is handled legally by the drivers - they just call the ZivaDS (the descrambler chip) and say "unlock the drive, unlock the title, decode the data". The driver code has no knowledge of CSS secrets - they're all contained within the hardware.
Right now, the support is good - VGA overlay is working for the most part, and IFO parsing (with the exception of selecting multiple camera angles) is done, so movies like The Matrix and Tomorrow Never Dies play correctly. Chapter searching works to a certain extent as well. There's a graphical frontend (gdxr2) available.
Unfortunately, there's no support yet for Creative's newest card, the DxR3 - it has some functions in software, which have not been released by Sigma (who manufactures the decoder hardware). Maybe ATi's release of binaries for the restricted materials will spur them along...
NO card manufacturer have claimed their video cards have on-board DVD decoders because nobody actually have them.
BUT, the "special feature" of ATI cards are leaps and bounds better than the "special features" on the other guys like nVidia and S3 (ATI's 1997 cards can accelerate DVD playback better than the newest nVidia cards, for example)
YUV, bi-li scaling and so forth have been available to most video cards since 1994, granted. However what REALLY matter is Motion Compensation and Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (IDCT), combining to about 60 - 70% of the actual decoding.
ATI cards have had Motion Compensation since 1997 IIRC, and newer cards from S3 are now *STARTING* to implement this feature. IDCT, that provides an even more dramatic acceleration, have been available since the Rage 128. And as of now, the only non-ATI chip that also has it is one from SiS and nobody else.
Well, if you have ~1Ghz processors of course all of them don't matter unless you are running 10's of apps at the same time.
I see that a lot of people are confused by what video card manufacturers mean when their pretty boxes scream 'DVD Acceleration!' on them.
Most of the modern video cards on the market can convert from YUV --> RGB on the fly. This is fairly significant, because to do this in software is about 25% of the decoding process on a software DVD player. As far as I know, the only video card(s) out there that support this under Linux are the Matrox G200/G400/G400MAX cards, using the mga_vid kernel module.
There are a few cards on the market that support what is called 'motion compensation', which eases CPU usage by significant amount, also. ATi cards have, in addition to motion compensation, what is called iDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform) - which eases CPU usage by an additional 5-10%.
These features are not the same as what MPEG-2 decoders do - they do nearly all the work onboard the card, themselves, except a few things, like CSS. Sigma Designs has designed a chip that does CSS in hardware, so we might start seeing hardware decoders from them in the near future for Linux. In the meantime, the best cards to have for Linux are from Matrox. (The G400MAX SGRAM card is the best, actually, for X speed and DVD). Feel free to read the DVD Playing HOWTO for more information. Additionally, README.MGA in the X documentation talks a bit about these cards - "Makes extensive use of the graphics accelerator. This server is very well accelerated, and is one of the fastest XFree86 X servers." Because Matrox has released the specs for the cards, things are coming along real well for it (like Utah-GLX, etc.) Check the cards out!
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