Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

XBMC Developers Criticize AMD's Linux Driver

Posted by timothy on from the pss-there's-a-conspiracy dept.

An anonymous reader writes "It's not only the NVIDIA Linux driver that has been publicly slammed over lacking support; the AMD Catalyst driver is now facing scrutiny from developers of the XBMC media and entertainment software. The developers aren't happy with AMD due to not properly supporting video acceleration under Linux. The AMD Linux driver is even lacking support for MPEG2 video acceleration and newer levels of H.264. AMD reportedly has the support coded, but they're refusing to turn it on in their public Linux driver."

3 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Their wishlist by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Informative

    What kind of piss-poor cpu can't decode mpeg2 in several times realtime?

    An Atom struggles to play 1080P MPEG-2, and you can forget 1080P H.264. Whereas my Xbmc box with an Atom and Nvidia Ion chipset has no problem with anything we've thrown at it.

  2. Re:Oh No by inhuman_4 · · Score: 4, Informative
    Mod parent up. I have computers with graphics cards from each. An older NVidia, a 5800 Radeon, and an Intel 3000. The intel open source (released by intel) kick ass. No kernel upgrade problems, no video rendering problems, no full screen problems, no multi-monitor problem. They don't include any extra BS software to make their stuff work.

    If you don't need gaming graphics Intel is the place to be in terms of linux support. I know what my next purchase is going to be. I just wish Intel would expand their market and try to compete on the high end. I would love to see chipzilla enter this fight with thier opensource record.

  3. Re:Actually I care... by MrHanky · · Score: 4, Informative

    That might be true for exceptionally poorly programmed versions of proprietary software, but neither ATI nor nvidia target specific distros with their drivers, they target a couple of revisions of the X server's ABI (and a few more for the kernel, which is a simpler task), and current distros pretty much all use the latest available at the time of release (minus one or two for Debian Stable). You're making it at least 100x more complicated than it really is.