Creative Labs GPLs dxr2 DVD Decoder Drivers

The Dakota Kidd writes "Just saw this on Linuxgames today - Creative has released the drivers for their dxr2 DVD decoder card. It isn't listed yet on Creative's Open Source page but it is in the CVS repository. " Kinda lost in the excitment of their open sourcing the drivers for SB Live!, but yet more good news on the hardware support front.Credit where it's due: Andrew deQuincey and Lucien Murray-Pitts actually wrote the code - it's nice to be able to get it now.

Comments

Who should get the Fame & Limitations of Driver

[kju]

I dislike this. Creative is taking the Fame for this Driver and is using it for their own public relations.

To clarify: This driver was not written by Creative. In fact its creation wasn't even supported by Creative with information about the hardware. I mailed with the author and he had to find out all informations by himself either by reference manuals or reverse engineering.

Now all Creative did was adding their Copyright messages (what a laugh!) and making the driver public available via their server. And they cheated the programmers again, as they made it available on their CVS without telling them how to access it, or even that the published it. When i mailed the author about this, he just didn't knew, that the driver where available in public.

Sorry, but if this is the way Creative wants to go in future for Linux "Support" i won't recommend buying their products.

And now for some clarification about the driver: As creative didn't helped the driver is still unstable and without many features. And the main parts of DVD (the navigation) are not contained. You may now play a VOB-File from the Disc (if the file is not encrypted). But you are missing all the DVD features, and if there are some extras mixed in one file, you will have to play them sequentially.

It is not very likely, that DVD navigation will be supported very soon, as the DVD forum has maked this a closed standard, which you have to pay for access and even sign a NDA.

So this driver is a first step, but will not really be helpful for dvd playing.

The only one who may help is Creative, as they have signed the NDA and have the standards. They would need to release a (binary-only) module for navigation and other issues. But if they continue to use other peoples work without doing anything thereselfs, this is not to be awaited.

In short: There is no fame which Creative can take for this driver. The haven't done anything and they even didn't show the willingness to do something in the future. This may change, but in the moment it doesn't look like.

If you want to watch DVD on Linux you better stick with a company which is truly supporting linux on their products. For example the guys from linuxtv.org/convergence.de will have a dvd decoder card for linux very likely till the end of this year in production. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, i just know them from the livid mailinglist. But they are truly supporting linux and not just taking other peoples work. So support them!

Looks like Creative is listening

[handorf]

Well, looking at opensource.creative.com, they're now crediting the author with the driver:

Also hosted on this site are the driver sources for DXR2
cards. These driver were donated to Creative, but are written and maintained by Andrew de Quincey.

Anybody got a "fe-sure" on if encrypted DVDs work or not? I'd love to plop in my new bubblegum crisis dvd tonight, but I'd REALLY love to watch it under Linux.
-- I'm omnipotent, I just don't care.

Dxr2

[echo]

The DxR2 is a decent card, but it's biggest problem is that it shoves the video through an analog VGA cable to overlay onto your video card. The picture is better than Television, but not as good as the software based DVD playback I've seen.

Does anyone know if there's a way to send the video from the Dxr2 /through/ the system bus (PCI) and write it directly into the frame buffer on the video card? If so, this would be the best of both worlds. If not currently, would this even be possible? I'd sure like to see the drivers setup to work this way for this card.

Also...

[Booker]

A couple of other interesting points:

This driver requires microcode from the Windows version of the drivers. (Just copy over a file called dvd1.ux) I guess that's a way to protect all those if-we-told-ya-we'd-have-ta-kill-ya hardware-level trade secrets?

Also, as I understand it, these were *not* developed *by* Creative, although Creative has given them their blessing. Hopefully the authors will pay us a visit and tell the story of how they came to be. :)

Update

[Booker]

From the v4l mailing list, the code on creative's site is old. Until the authors get CVS write access, go here.

If you're interested, here's the first part of the readme:

Readme for DXR2 driver v0.9b

This is still a DEVELOPMENT driver, because parts of it are still not properly tested, and a few parts are missing (see "Todo"). The player program could do with some more user friendliness :)

The driver is being actively developed by adq@tardis.ed.ac.uk, and lucien@martincurrie.com

************************************************** **************************
Also, VGA overlay is not yet supported.... output is to a TV connected to the video output of the card.
************************************************** **************************

The current IOCTL interface is TEMPORARY and WILL change... probably to be compatable with the prototype DVD interface on linuxtv.org's web pages.

The current major device number (120) is TEMPORARY, and only for development purposes. It WILL change when the driver is finished.

It has been tested with kernels 2.2.5, 2.2.9, 2.2.12

Newer version avaliable

[Schemer]

The version of the drivers on creative's web page aren't the most recent. The most recent version can be found here:

http://www.geocities.com/dxr2linux

Al so take a look at the developers message on the livid mailing list:

http ://livid.on.openprojects.net/pipermail/livid-dev/1 999-November/000770.html