Notes On The Future of Video on Linux

Dina's Dream points out two interesting articles currently running on LinuxPower, and linked from Gnotices (GNOME news site) as well. "The first article is a really good summary of the current state of affairs of video under Linux and the direction we should take. Questions are bounced back between a few very knowledgeable people, including GStreamer developers, SGI people and Alan Cox. The second article is a set of lessons learned by Chris Pirazzi while working at SGI. Chris was involved in a lot of Video API programming at Silicon Graphics, and raises a few very good points based on his experience. All people even remotely working on video drivers or software should read these points and take them to heart."

Comments

Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

I love this philosophy. Cut the crap, focus
on what's important, and you end up with the
right facilities to build higher-layer stuff
on top of later.

Whatever happened to Broadcast 2000?

[Vindicated]

Are they still around? Is anyone continuing their work? And what of VirtualDub? Is there a Linux port out? Anyone know? It sucks to have to boot into Windows just to use premiere... (Yeah, yeah VMWare, but shhh :) ).

Re:Whatever happened to Broadcast 2000?

[qqtortqq]

Its interesting you mention broadcast2000. I used to use it, but gave up due to crashes and things, but it was a neat program if they ever got the bugs out of it.

From: http://heroinewarrior.com/bcast2000.php3

After a long period of deliberation on the matter, Broadcast 2000 has been removed from public access due to excessive liability.

We've already seen several organizations win lawsuits against GPL/ warranty free software writers because of damage that software caused to the organization. Several involved the RIAA vs mp3/p2p software writers. Several involved the MPAA vs media player authors. You might say that warranty exemption has become quite meaningless in today's economy.

Fucking dmca....

Re:DivX ;-)

[MartinG]

Interesting. I hadn't seen vp3.2 before.
I notice their license is derived from the Mozilla Public License 1.1
Can anyone comment on whether that is good or bad news? eg. will the gstreamer folks be able to include vp3.2 codec support and distribute it as a plugin?

Re:SSSCA

[Russ Steffen]

If the SSSCA passes there won't be any linux. Not in the US anyway.

Video performance-Gfx performance issues

[matusa]

This isn't exactly the same topic, but a related issue and something I've been upset about for years.

Namely: graphics drivers should be moved into the kernel, which should provide a very low level graphics API

There are many people opposed to this as bloat in the kernel. But come on, there are so many things in the kernel that should be called bloat if gfx is bloat (like sound for instance).

And of course this is related to video. I think these low level drivers would include support for TV/out, processing signals from TV cards, standardizing APIs.. etc.

• Anyway, I have many reasons FOR this.
• We have massive duplication of effort with many different projects developing their own low level drivers for gfx cards. this would eliminate that. Sure they could all have some card-specific code, but we wouldn't see nearly the level of duplicated effort we do now (think GGI-X-directfb-svgalib-list goes on)
• It is my belief that vendors would be more motivated to create drivers if we had a simple and super standard low level API. 'gfx driver for linux' wouldn't mean 'write an xserver' or 'write an svgalib driver also'
• This in my belief is what it would take to get linux gfx to a much higher state