AMD Releases Open-Source UVD Video Support

[G_M_C]

Within the next few hours AMD will be publishing open-source driver code that exposes their Unified Video Decoder (UVD) engine on modern Radeon HD graphics cards. This will finally allow open-source graphics drivers to take advantage of hardware-accelerated video decoding.

I hope this information is useful for some of the developers here on Doom9, like nevcariel (LAV-filters) or madshi (madVR).

for further info see: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_opensource_uvd&num=1

[LoRd_MuldeR]

This doesn't sound like there will be a new API for applications to use UVD. Actually it doesn't effect applications at all. Instead the article says that AMD will publish driver code which should make it possible to support UVD in OpenSource graphic's drivers. Consequently this will be useful for Linux users only. And only if they use the OpenSource "radeon" drivers instead of AMD's proprietary Linux drivers. It even says that UVD will be exposed through VDPAU, the same API that NVidia uses to provide hardware-accelerated video decoding on Linux. Ideally this means that for VDPAU-enabled Linux applications nothing will change.

On the Windows platform, the official Catalyst drivers already expose hardware-accelerated video decoding, through the DXVA API, for a long time. So Windows applications (including OpenSource software) can make use of UVD already. Also, to my knowledge, there are no (relevant) OpenSource graphic's drivers for the Windows platform that could benefit from the new driver code AMD is going to publish.

Don't want to say that this isn't good news, but the reference to LAV-filters or madVR probably is misleading here ;)