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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."
nVidia's binary drivers and X.org's Intel drivers have had XvMC support for well over a year. I've been using both card successfully with Xine and accelerated 1080p video. I think the news here is that the nouveau project is catching up, but that's hardly clear from the article.
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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
how long until
What does this message say? It doesn't display on my computer.
Playing a video is no problem.
The problem is that a high-bitrate 1080p video stream requires a lot of CPU time to decode, and then you have to transfer the whole uncompressed frame out to the video card.
Unless you have a really high-end CPU, there are no Windows-based video players capable of doing this with just software. They all require some kind of hardware acceleration. The specs for all this are nicely closed up, and are known only to Microsoft, video card manufacturers, and the few companies that implement video decoders (which is probably Microsoft again).
Video card manufacturers like nVidia have refused to implement any kind of video decoding in their Linux drivers until there's an appropriate spec. They won't tell anyone what they're hardware is actually capable of, so nobody else can write a spec. We can't even reference Microsoft's basic design, because it's all closed off and secret.
Oh, and most of it doesn't even work properly in Windows either. I've never managed to get it to work at all, and benchmarks I've seen seem to suggest that it's really only offloading 10% or so of the workload. Just enough to make the difference between working and not working, but not as much as it could be.
The Gallium guys are planning to implement the entire thing in their video drivers, using only the 3D capabilities that video cards are known to have. That neatly bypasses the whole thing, but required that we have a single base driver to work with (which Gallium provides), and one or more video drivers actually using it (which, again, Gallium provides).
I kind of hope that Gallium implements something similar to nVidia's CUDA - a programming model for running stuff on graphics cards that doesn't rely on graphics-related stuff like textures or polygons. That way, we'd have a way to implement different kinds of video decoders, encoders, or even things like physics simulations. Bonus points if it can be made compatible with something available on Windows...
That said... Linux video players tend to be a hell of a lot quicker than Windows video players. I've played videos in Linux that were impossible to play in Linux.
I've played videos in Linux that were impossible to play in Linux.
You should try Linux next time.
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