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NVIDIA Releases New Video API For Linux

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the finally-starting-to-play-ball dept.

Ashmash writes "Phoronix is reporting on a new Linux driver nVidia is about to release that brings PureVideo features to Linux. This video API will reportedly be in nVidia's 180 series driver for Linux, Solaris, and *BSD. PureVideo has been around for several nVidia product generations, but it's the first time they're bringing this feature to these non-Windows operating systems to provide an improved multimedia experience. This new API is named VDPAU, and is described as: 'The Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) provides a complete solution for decoding, post-processing, compositing, and displaying compressed or uncompressed video streams. These video streams may be combined (composited) with bitmap content, to implement OSDs and other application user interfaces.'"

8 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Documentation here by 3.1415926535 · · Score: 4, Informative

    ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/vdpau/doxygen/html/index.html

  2. Re:Form follows code. by mandelbr0t · · Score: 4, Informative

    TFA mentions that patches for MPlayer to use VDPAU on Linux are already available. Hopefully Xine follows shortly.

    --
    "Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
  3. This isn't a new nvidia driver by LingNoi · · Score: 5, Informative

    The summary confused me a little into thinking this was a new nvidia driver. It is in fact new features being added to their closed source driver.

  4. Re:Form follows code. by 3.1415926535 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Fine. Now what programs use this API?

    mplayer (sort of, it's still pretty rough around the edges):

    ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/vdpau/mplayer-vdpau-3076399.tar.bz2

    It'll probably take a while before complete, stable support for all of VDPAU's features (like timestamp-based presentation) are fully supported by the common video players.

  5. Re:XVID or DivX by Narishma · · Score: 3, Informative

    TFA says it supports MPEG, H264 and VC1.

    --
    Mada mada dane.
  6. Re:ATI by Lorkki · · Score: 5, Informative

    You might be interested to know that ATI's equivalent was also revealed a short while ago.

  7. Re:Form follows code. by RedWizzard · · Score: 5, Informative

    nVidia have released patches for libavcodec, libavutil, and ffmpeg. So most Linux software should pick up support in pretty quick time.

  8. Re:ATI by JohnFluxx · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ash-foxes blog post is close to being a troll.

    Of course X does direct rendering. It's called Direct Rendering Interface - DRI. And the new improved DRI2 being worked on now.

    His other argument is that Xorg will never be able to have a unified memory manager... which is exactly what TTM and its successor GEM do.

    And noone in the Xorg team claims that indirect rendering is as fast as direct rendering.

    Companies like NVidia just replace chunks of Xorg without contributing anything back. Whereas its companies like Intel that actually contribute to improving X for everything - pushing a unified memory manager (TTM/GEM) into the kernel etc.