The Phoronix website is reporting that AMD will be publishing open-source driver code that exposes their Unified Video Decoder (UVD) engine on modern Radeon HD graphics cards, which will allow open-source graphics drivers to take advantage of hardware-accelerated video decoding. Open-source UVD/video-acceleration support to go along with their open-source OpenGL is something Linux uses have long been waiting for.
Visit the Phoronix blog post for more details and links to the code released thusfar.
Hopefully Linus will raise the other digit for AMD…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_36yNWw_07g
I read they didn’t release any source code or instructions so I heard that Linux users were on their own.
They have put the requires sources in mesa/gallium3D allready; the ‘bin’ that was released is the microcode, firmware, ‘code that runs on the GPU’, /lib/firmware/ stuff.
The binary blob driver includes this stuff aswell (but compiled in) and loads it it onto the GPU whenver the driver gets loaded.
Quite standard stuff. Sure, openfirmware would be better, and maybe in time, we will even see that. But for now, this is pretty good. Also, the firmware isn’t anything huge. There’s apparently a lot of look up tables that are responsible for most of the file size. The firmware doesn’t do a whole lot really.
They would never truly open this up. There are so many greedy Trial Lawyers out there just waiting for someone to be so foolish. If they did open-up the lawyers would swoop down and pick their bones clean using infringement claims against large numbers of frivolous and/or ambiguous patents issued by the dysfunctional and corrupt government-controlled U.S. Patent and Trade Office.