Hardware-Based Video Acceleration Coming To Linux

sammydee writes "Phoronix reports that GPU based video decoding acceleration will be implemented in Gallium3d sometime this year. Drivers currently using Gallium3d include the open source nouveau driver for NVIDIA cards and experimental Intel GMA drivers. This is definitely good news for anybody who has ever tried to play high-definition 1080p content on any CPU older than about a year."

Comments

Extremely stupid

[Bombula]

I suppose I'm both ignorant and stupid, having been out of the build-your-own-box scene for more than five years now, because whenever I stroll past the video card section at best buy I swear I read things like, "LIGHTNING FAST DVD PLAYBACK AND VIDEO DECODING!" I had no idea video decoding was still CPU dependent. Give the governor harumph, I guess.

Re:Extremely stupid

[jonwil]

Part of the problem with hardware accelerated video decoding on Linux is that because Windows uses the accelerated video decoding to play back DRM protected media, the hardware companies cannot reveal how the video decoding part works (since it would presumably allow someone to grab the unencrypted-but-compressed video for various DRM protected video files by writing a windows driver or something)

Re:Extremely stupid

[MBGMorden]

Actually, there's an extra flip-flop step in there. When DVD's FIRST came out, hardware decoders were quite common. I remember DVD drives commonly coming with PCI hardware decoders (the RealMagic Hollywood+ was common) because at the time, many home computers simply didn't have the horsepower to pull off real-time MPEG2 decoding. My computer system when I got my first DVD drive was an AMD K6-2 450Mhz and software encoders couldn't keep up and I'd get occasional video stuttering. My hardware DVD decoder card kept up with the video just fine though.

After I upgraded to a Celeron which was overclocked to 550mhz, I was able to then switch to a software encoder (preferable because the hardware solution had very finicky drivers).

So we went from hardware, to software, back to hardware, back to software, and now back to hardware yet again :).

Re:Extremely stupid

[MilesAttacca]

And those hardware encoders are still godsends. I picked up a 500MHz Pentium III ThinkPad and a Margi PCMCIA decoder card for about $100, which gives me two hours' battery life and a 13.3" screen -- which respectively equal and thrash your average portable DVD player. When I'm not playing movies I can use the same device to check my e-mail, and when I am watching movies, I can even use a dongle to hook it up to a bigger screen and use it as my only DVD player. The downside is that I have to dual-boot because you can't find Linux Margi drivers anymore. (Can anyone hook me up?)

Don't know what to say ...

[Swizec]

... you mean we can do all the fancy stuff windows can, and better. But playing videos efficiently was the one thing we couldn't do? We had fancy GUI effects long before windows, we had efficient RAM usage, great file systems, but we had trouble playing a fucking video?

Wow, wish I'd known.

Not really

[JamesP]

This is definitely good news for anybody who has ever tried to play high definition 1080p content on any CPU older than about a year.

Actually, one of the most preeminent examples of HW decoding of video nowadays is the Intel Atom processor, not really old processors.

Video accel. is inside the chipset for this one.

And yes, it is available in Linux, you will probably be able to watch h264 movies in your new EEEPC

Re:Already there

[samkass]

The LLVM approach is interesting. They're basically following Apple's lead here, whose drivers use LLVM intermediate bytecode to compile shaders to either a GPU or CPU depending on hardware availability and heuristics. It basically makes it easier to support new hardware and provide relatively high-performance fallbacks in the case specific hardware capabilities are not present. All using a common architecture instead of one-off development.

Re:Already there

[hummassa]

1080p with XvMC and which codec? I thought XvMC didn't do x264, for instance.

What about software?

[ThePhilips]

Last time I was trying to play HD video on my Ubuntu - with both Xine and Mplayer - I hadn't noticed that there was performance problem related to lack of HW acceleration. (I didn't tried VLC - it can't even playback smoothly HD video on Windows where such acceleration is already available.)

While CPU load was remaining low (~25% on dual core CPU), 720p video still was playing with terrible jitter. In Mplayer few minutes later A/V sync (as usually) went south. Xine started dropping frames. All that while nor CPU load, nor kernel times where displaying any anomaly.

I'd say that problem lies elsewhere and HW accel (though welcome) might not solve the video playback problems.

P.S. At least when there would be HW accel, it would be easier to bash the server/hpc/oracle folks who now monopolize completely LKML. Probably then they would start paying attention to desktop Linux needs. Quoter of the attention they spent discussion fresh Oracle benchmarks would be more than enough.

P.P.S. Tests (actually I was just trying to watch my anime on Linux) where done on AMD 4200+ X2 + nVidia gf7800gt (evil proprietary drivers are installed) + RAM 2GB DDR CL2.

PS3 and future possibilites

[tchiseen]

I'm not sure, but I've heard that a lack of hardware video acceleration is one of the factors which currently limits the capabilities of the PS3 as a linux machine (along with memory support and lack of emulators for the cpu architecture). This article gives me a bit of hope that we might see advances in the capabilities of the PS3 under Linux. ( http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=624865 )

Re:Already there

[roystgnr]

nVidia's binary drivers and X.org's Intel drivers have had XvMC support for well over a year.

I'm confused - what happened a year ago? nVidia's binary drivers have had XvMC support for their older cards for many years, whereas for the 8xxx series of cards their drivers lack XvMC support *still* (at least as of the version 173.14.05 I installed a couple months ago).

Re:Not 1 year

[DirkGently]

Dual-core 2.5Ghz AMD. In the same boat.

720p x264 works, though. I'm told there are MAJOR improvements in the new versions of ffmpeg that allow multi-threaded playback. I've been to chicken to upgrade my MythTV box to find out.