LPC: Life after X [LWN.net]

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 5, 2010 23:35 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263)
Parent article: LPC: Life after X

>and VDPAU is an improvement over Xv

My experience with a Digital Signage project: VDPAU has been quite some crap. It requires significantly more CPU power when displaying two 1920×1080 WMV3 clips at the same time compared to Xv. (With a single one, it's all finego figure.) If it was not for the nvidia driver only providing a maximum XvImage size of 2048×2048, I would still use Xv to display a single 3840×1080 clip. And since I have seen 8192×8192 offered somewhere by some radeon* or so driver, I don't believe that 2048 is due to some hardware limitation.

(Log in to post comments)

Xv hardware limit

Posted Nov 6, 2010 11:10 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

It is / can be a hardware limitation. Which is why there are advertised limits.

You mentioned Radeon. If you buy a brand new radeon desktop chipset, that does a nice big Xvimage properly. But if you go back a few years (or go down a few price ranges) you get older chips with a maximum of... drum roll... 2048x2048

It was a lot back then. I have a desktop PC with TWO video outs, and a maximum supported desktop width across those two outputs of 2048. What use is that? But when the chip was made 1024x768 was still a decent resolution and so 2048 was two whole monitors...

I don't know which NVidia driver you're looking at. It's possible (not certain) that newer NVidia hardware can do 8192x8192 but your driver doesn't expose that through an oversight or because it uses an older hardware spec. and hasn't been updated for a new one where some extra bitfields were added or a new method was used for larger textures.