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Linux DVD hardware support From SiS
An anonymous reader pointed us to a press release from SIS that
proclaims that they will support Linux DVD soon as well as 3D stuff. It's a little sketchy, but looks positive on the 3D stuff, and aims to support LiViD. Here's hopin'
The article's section on "About Linux" is almost as long as the part about SiS's support of their chipset. I would think by now people could have a smaller blurb about Linux with a link to some site (linux.com maybe) for more info.
I've had so much crap using a special application for watching dvd movies. The worst part is that the creative labs program only supports overlay. But we can't use the decoder card's overlay because it makes the passthrough image crappy when you're not watching a movie. The tv output is excellent, but it's damn near impossible to click on the bonus goodies sometimes. I'd love to have the opportunity to choose from several programs that utilize the card from a universal driver.
"Woah... I know Chmod"
Huh? They just make IC's... how can that have anything to do with the RIAA?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I can't help but notice that it says "proclaims" and not a definte yes or no answer...
-PovRayMan
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
Unless SiS has some kind of leverage against the MPAA, expect a binary-only driver with an undocumented API/ioctl() set that basically only lets you play DVDs in a window. Exposing a general API would allow (gasp!) copying or other "unauthorized" digital manipulation of the MPEG stream.
Personally, I'd like to be able to drive the decompression process myself, so I can use the movie as an OpenGL texture to map on to a sphere and bounce it around. The Cthugha-like possibilities are endless, but only if programmers can get at the data in a meaningful way.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
This is a hardware DVD/Audio decoder. It might be one of the first with explicit support for Linux, but it's hardly the first one. Why would the Recording Industry and Artists Association care about a DVD/CSS matter? If anybody would, it'd be the MPAA, and SiS doesn't seem to be doing anything that would annoy them. One would thing the MPAA would appreciate a non-DeCSS method of playing DVD's on Linux.
Will most of the people fighting the RIAA give up and go watch their movies? How much of the rebellion is about freedom, and how much is about playing DVDs under Linux?
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
I suppose this could be taken to mean that they're going to open up the specs to this chipset. However, since they refer specifically to the LiViD projet, I am more inclined to suspect that this actually means that they're preparing (closed source?) codecs that interface with Lamp's plugin API. Which isn't terrible, but isn't an optimal solution, either.
But since we don't actually know anything, I'd say do one of two things: 1) Find an e-mail address for their marketing department (or, preferably, someone more informed) and politely ask for clarification, and 2) don't flame them in the meantime for not telling us more, not promising to open-source the spec, etc.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
The hardware accelerated DVD they're claiming to offer Linux support for requires the use of their motherboard chipset(s), which have integrated video support. Unfortunately, this won't help me watch DVDs on my SGI 1600SW or anyone who doesn't use a motherboard that has their chipset on it and uses its integrated graphics support. OTOH, it would be great for someone who wants an inexpensive Linux-based computer to watch DVDs.
I admit there is some coolness factor in having a dvd play while you're on irc or something, but having seen pc based decoding and a standalone machine, you get a more immersive feeling when you dont have to be distracted by the occasional mouse pointer, or the chuntering of hard drives. Not to mention the eternal humming noise of your average PC's overloaded fans.
Even worse, when the damn screensaver kicks in just as the hero is about to do something dangerous/sensuous.
So, what are people's preferences, and reasons for them?
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
DVD !!! Whoa !!!
I'm still looking forward to a 2X CR-ROM.
Luckily for me the way I lag in the hardware department, this thing will all be sorted out my the time I'm in the market for on of these jobbies.
shoulda previewed. bah!
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Press releases are marketing, and border on being lies. This is no big secret. Always wait until the actual goods are delivered, and then make your judgements based on the goods.
Too bad Wall Street doesn't judge this way.
It will NOT be opensource.
Get on the livid-dev mailinglist, one of the SiS guys is on there.
Commercial efforts can NOT open source DVD programs. The legal risk is worse for them than for people like LIVID, who have no financial stake in a DVD player.
--ryan.
Don't say, "don't quote me," because if no one quotes you, you probably haven't said a thing worth saying.
"mickey and mallory know the difference between right and wrong. they just don't give a damn." - steven wright, natural born killers.
jon katz. champion of the outcast teen. what has made him so sympathetic to the cause of the columbine killers? why has this event seemingly resonated so deeply within him? is jon just sympathetic to the life of the modern teen? or is there something more? something insidious?
these are the questions i've been asking myself as i've read katz's obsessive columbine writings. these were the questions i was asking myself as i sat mesmerized by my natalie portman poster. like a torrent of sudden rain, my spirit guides bombarded me with the heinous images of jon's life. i was so disturbed i could barely bring myself to write this.
jon was born and raised in a small, southwestern town. his father, carlito, was a mexican immigrant who worked for the department of transportation, building highways. his mother, juno, was a gypsy who earned money by performing card readings. the family made a comfortable living and jon was a happy, outgoing child, who even contributed to the family income by cleaning dog excrement from the neighborhood sidewalks.
carlito was a hard-worker. in fact, he worked too hard. one particularly hot, sunny day, he was overcome with heat exhaustion. the incident had changed carlito forever. the charming, jovial, caring carlito became a vile, egomaniacal, misogynist. carlito soon lost his job and spent the rest of his days lounging around the house.
the first incident of abuse happened when jon was but 6 years old. juno had lured a siamese cat into the house. she let the cat roam around until it was time for her to prepare it for the family's dinner. jon had just come home from a long day of sidewalk cleaning. carlito was laying on the couch with a 40 ounce schlitz. the putrid stench of dog manure flooded the house as jon closed the door. carlito was roused from his wrestling match. infuriated, he jumped off the couch, grabbing juno's cat by the tail. carlito stormed over to jon, who had backed himself into a corner. jon could do nothing but cry as carlito severely beat him with the screeching cat.
the more jon cried, the more carlito beat him. after fifteen minutes of abuse, carlito plunged his hand into the stomach of the dead animal and gutted it right there in front of jon. he ate the entrails and forced his stunned son to wear the pelt as a hat for the rest of the week.
the beatings continued for a few more years, at a lesser severity. until just after jon's 10th birthday. jon invited his friend ron over to spend the night. carlito would usually hide in the bedroom whenever anyone visited, so it was always a good way for jon to escape the beatings. the boys had had fun roaming the neighborhood that evening, making castles with the dog excrement they found and then pretending to be giant monsters, from a japanese science fiction movie, going on a rampage and smashing the castles. the boys played hard that night and went to bed early.
but the boys could not sleep. instead, they decided to play doctor and various other games. the laughter awakened carlito. he stormed into the bedroom and flipped on the light. there, he beheld his son on all fours with his little friend mounting him from behind. the boys were playing "dog." carlito lost control. he threw ron out of the house, sending him walking home and picked jon up by the feet.
carlito stormed outside, carrying his naked son by the feet. he rampaged throughout the neighborhood stopping any time he ran across a dog. carlito would beat hapless animal to death, using his son as a club. once again, he would plunge his hand into the dead animal, remove its organs and devour them. he then collected the pelt.
after carlito had slaughtered twenty dogs, he tied together all of the pelts into a make-shift body-suit for jon. exhausted, and with jon bruised, bloodied and crying, carlito stumbled home. carlito wrapped jon in the gruesome clothing he had made and threw him into bed. he left the room momentarily, only to return with an empty 40-ounce. he stuck the open end into jon's rectum. jon cried himself to sleep.
jon grew sullen and withdrew from his classmates. his grades slipped into oblivion. the teachers knew what the problem was, but dared not speak up. jon would sit in class, staring blankly out the window. nothing seemed to interest him. he never did his assignments. he began to arrive at school wearing ozzy osbourne and motley crue t-shirts. the faculty continued to ignore him. jon had become lost in a nether-world and none could pull him out.
none but timmy. timmy's family had recently moved into town from california. jon felt him come in the room and turned from the window to behold his first real crush. timmy was tall, muscular, tanned and blonde. it was instant love for jon. but he dared not express his true feelings. he became best friends with timmy. they did everything together. jon's emotions were tearing him apart.
jon couldn't stand it and his father had taught him well. jon invited timmy to go searching for peyote. the two wandered deep into the desert, the hot sun beating down on them. the intense heat slowly began to affect jon. he turned pale. he began to shake uncontrollably. then timmy made a fatal mistake.
timmy put his hand on jon's shoulder and asked him if he was ok. jon became enraged. he picked up a rock and hit timmy in the head with it, knocking him unconscious. jon plunged his shaking fist into timmy's stomach and removed his organs, eating them on the spot. jon then removed the skin from the withered corpse and carried back to his car.
jon kept the skin in his room, making passionate love with it at night. snuggling with it in the morning. he would whisper sweet nothings into its ear and run his fingers through its golden head of hair. jon was in a state of bliss. until carlito detected the scent of rotting flesh. jon was given another gruesome beating.
jon fell in and out of love several times throughout highschool. each of the unfortunate objects of his affections would suffer the same fate and, once they mysteriously vanished from school, jon would return to his withdrawn state. only one teacher had the courage to try to help jon his senior year of highschool.
jon had signed up for a computer class that year. his computer teacher recognized jon was troubled and took special care with him. jon soon developed a deep love for his teacher. but jon was ashamed. he couldn't quite grasp the complicated concepts that were part of the course: basic wordstar usage, lotus 123 and flipping the power switch. jon felt like a fool in front of his new love. he could not deal with his feelings.
jon began to amass a deadly arsenal in his bedroom. he collected all manner of guns, rifles and bombs. he drew a detailed map of the school and devised a plan for decimating the entire building and everyone in it. jon dreamt of becoming a notorious mass-murderer, no longer ignored. no longer a powerless worm in the eyes of his beloved mr. donacelli.
the night before "senior day." jon decided to celebrate by getting drunk. tomorrow his glorious plan would come to fruition. jon got drunk off of a gallon of cheap vodka. utterly incoherent, he climbed onto the roof of his house with the remains of his bottle and a fat cigar. he danced, naked, on the rooftop and yelled at the top of his lungs, "i'm gay, touch my balls!"
jon's father woke from his alcoholic coma, not knowing that the neighbors had called the police. he ran outside and found jon on the roof. carlito climbed the side of the house and grabbed his son by the hair, throwing him onto the ground below. carlito spotted a lizard in the grass near jon. he jumped down, caught the lizard and began to severely beat jon. the police arrived within minutes.
the police immediately took carlito into custody. they searched the house and found jon's arsenal, which they confiscated, thinking it belonged to carlito. carlito was subsequently convicted of assault and conspiracy. jon would never be beaten again.
april 20, 1999. jon sat in front of his television watching with fascination as the columbine tragedy unfolded before his eyes. wistfully, jon thought back to his days in highschool. he knew these two young men were heros. they pulled it off. an accomplishment he had only dreamt of. jon took out his pen and paper and began work on his next slashdot article.
thank you.
i like german girls. and nannies.
The MPAA are the evil bastards concerned with Linux DVD. The RIAA is the other bunch of evil bastards. (the ones trying to sue Napster into the ground.) I know they're both evil, and bastards, and suing the shit out of everyone in sight, but try to keep them straight.
[flamebait]
While I'm on the subject; Hey! Jacko! Yeah, you Valenti! How 'bout getting that head of yours out of you ass?
[/flamebait]
.sig: Now legally binding!
Thats good, but when will apple release a mov player for linux...we need that damm it
What exactly is loose-knit? I think that he's trying to call us stupid! j.k.
Notice that just the commercial shipments will increase at that rate. Does this include downloaded free versions? The chip that is the point of the article will help ensure that non-commercial shipments will continue to increase, too
--
Linux DVD
Promised but not delivered
Blame MPAA
For them to claim to support Linux is just marketing babble - until someone writes a driver for this beast, its useless.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
This is awesome, except not really. It's great that a company is offering Linux support, but an announcement like this in the Windows world would be met with laughs. SIS has never made even a mediocre graphics chip. All their chips have rated from Man this sucks to Man this sucks as much as Windows 2000! It really shows how easily exited the alternate OS community is about any support whatsoever.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to do." - I don't remember
Crap. here:
Linux DVD
Chafes the MPAA so.
Drown them in spring rain.
The administrators of this site need to get their act together. This is probably the 20th time I've submitted a story and a week later it gets posted to slashdot under someone else's name. It's hard to believe that someone actually sent this in before me, since I submitted it the night of the press release...
It pisses me off, they should bother to actually read the submissions rather than postign randomly.
Assuming this does support a standard API, wouldn't this give us the ability (albeit closed source ability) to read the unencrypted mpeg stream?
If that's the case, then how could DeCSS be any more a tool for piracy than this? If the MPAA lets this go, then they'd be admitting that DMCA case against DeCSS would have no merit (as if it ever did). Of course we'd still have the reverse engineering case to deal with.
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
I have an alter-ego at Red Dwarf. Don't remind me that coward.
Just a tip - I installed Red Hat on a system with a SiS graphics card, and I had a bitch of a time getting linux support. No drivers, poor documentation - I had to guess on all of the input values until it worked.
I was kinda shocked to see their name in connection with Linux!
No comment at this time
When will slashdot realize that Linux isnt the only other OS besides windows? Just because one company decided to do a DVD thing for linux doesnt resolve the whole issue. The root of the problem of not having dvd support in OS's other than windows is that DVD is not an open format/protocol, simply because Linux has become popular and there will likely be DVD support in the future for it. What about BeOS, *BSD, and everything else, attack the root of the problem and not just your specific needs!
I'm a little confused here. SiS has opened their specs in the past so that open source developers can write drivers for their hardware. This is what all the open source advocates want.
So the SiS drivers written by the open source community suck, and people have a hard time getting their hardware to work because of the poor drivers.
Now, they annouce they will be writing their own drivers for Linux.
Why should there be any connection between drivers/support written by the open source community and drivers/support from the company creating the hardware?
SiS has give the open source community the 'support' that they want (i.e. open specs) in the past, but users complain about the crappy drivers, and say 'avoid their hardware'.
I don't get it.
"Good people drink good beer"
You're complaining about SiS hardware, but who wrote the poor drivers? The open source community or SiS?
SiS has opened their specs in the past, which is what the open source community wants. Don't blame them if the drivers are not up to par, blame the open source community.
Let's have a little consistency here. NVIDIA gets bashed for releasing good drivers, but they won't release their specs. SiS gets bashed because they've released their specs, but the open source drivers suck.
What's it going to be?
"Good people drink good beer"
Does anyone know if having a computer DVD player means you have to pay the TV license (in the UK)? I know they say you have to if you've got a card which can pick up broadcast signals, but does it apply to DVD?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Point well taken...
But don't forget alternative platforms (mine being an alpha system) running Linux.
In other words, the only way to fairly support Linux DVD is an open source driver.
Right now I'm busy porting Glide over to eventually get DRI running on X4!!! If I see some good DVD software, I don't mind decoding in SW on my alpha. I've got the cycles to spare. Plus, the Multimedia instruction set (simular to MMX) can decode 8 pixels of MPEG per cycle.
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
look at the effort that went into the matrox drivers. think its any coincedence that matrox makes the best 2d cards out there? (it was debatable until nine went out) its worth it more to spend the time and effort on supporting good hardware. seems like the SiS cards are not that good and thus, not that worth supporting. If the mga drivers supported gamma, they would be perfect.
Pretty much the only reason I ordered the DVD option on my Compaq 1800T running BeOS, Linux and NT was so that I could watch movies on airplanes. Being a consultant who just moved away from Silicon Valley, I expect to be traveling a lot.
The machine came stock with Windows 98. Installing NT ate my hard disk so now I have to install a third-party DVD player and I'd rather use Linux than try to get a licensed one working on NT.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Haiku is, in and of itself, merely a simplistic meter format:
Linux DVD
Chafes the MPAA so.
Kill the rat-bastards.
When Haiku originated, it was intended to be a medium for conveying imagery about nature in general, (not 'seasons' as you would have us believe) and over the years some American english/writing teachers have decided that haiku must neccessarily involve some sort of natural reference.
Linux DVD
Chafes the MPAA so;
As vines to the oak.
Or, as His Cowardice has put it:
Linux DVD
Chafes the MPAA so.
Drown them in spring rain.
But this restriction need not be enforced unless the traditional japanese haiku poets somehow rise from the dead and seek out all those who would destroy their artform. In which case, there are approx. 523 billion angst-struck teenagers who are further up on the list than we at slashdot are. Therefore, I present this alternative haiku:
MPAA will,
from comment-boards on Slashdot,
find out where you live.
Levine
I post this story it gets rejected....An anonymous coward posts it and it goes up on /.
Damn try and try and try and all i get is rejected;(
I'd like a good software decoder so I can see what a DVD would looked like on my I-opened-it.
Oh, I'm sure it will look like shit, but I'm still curious. Also, I'd have the satisfaction of having the MPAA and Netpliance have a stroke at the same time.
The point that interested me the most, because I'm a audiophile at times, was the 5.1channel output. Can you see, in the now near future, something like the Netwinder (Ie, just enough CPU to play a DVD or an MP3) but with a DVD player, plugged into your TV and stereo. It would get on the internet, play movies and write documents for one damn cheap price. Cheaper than buying the bits seperately anyway.
They officially support the OpenBIOS project, of which I am a member (ok, so I haven't been active in a while, I got a Linux job, etc...)
SiS provides BIOS code *and* hardware, so there.
Stop trashing them, they're really on our side.
Is anyone else out there tired of hearing companies say, "Sometime, in the future, between now and the end of all time, we may actually produce a driver for our hardware DVD decoding cards. But in the meantime, please buy our product and use it on Windows." Frankly, I would really like to see a company come out with a beta or alpha driver and then publicize it. I'm starting to think that it's just another way to gather support from the OSS community.
"Hey, I know," nudge, nudge, "let's tell them that we will support DVD playback on Linux. Yeah, that's it. Then we won't ever actually produce anything, but we will have everybody saying that we support open source. Yeah, that would be great." Bah. I haven't had much time to play around with the available open DVD playback systems, but I would really like to see one of the Linux distributors have the guts to include it so that we could see what all the fuss is about. (I know, just do it yourself. Sorry, I really don't have the time.)
Bite my yammer.
Why do people moderate posts that are under -1 posts that will never be moderated up? If the parent post is -1, then the only way the child post will be displayed is if the threshold is set to -1. Seems a waste of mod points to me.