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Hardware-Based Video Acceleration Coming To Linux

Posted by kdawson on from the buh-bye-frame-skipping dept.

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."

5 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Don't know what to say ... by Swizec · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... 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.

  2. Not really by JamesP · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

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  3. Re:Extremely stupid by jonwil · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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)

  4. Re:Already there by hummassa · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

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  5. Re:Not 1 year by DirkGently · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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