VA API slowly -- but surely -- making progress

Posted Jul 2, 2009 9:48 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
Parent article: VA API slowly -- but surely -- making progress

I'm a bit surprised to see something that only "works" with closed drivers, only targets patented video formats, and was only merged in permissive software stacks, to get such proeminent lwn.net coverage

Is there any reason to think it won't dead-end like previous attempts to add hardware acceleration without trying seriously to engage FLOSS actors (Via acceleration patches that never acquired any traction any come to mind)?

VA API slowly -- but surely -- making progress

Posted Jul 2, 2009 17:21 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

> I'm a bit surprised to see something that only "works" with closed drivers, only targets patented video formats, and was only merged in permissive software stacks, to get such proeminent lwn.net coverage

The nice thing about VA-API is that once your application targets it then it can take take advantage of all the different sorts of video acceleration out there. Well, that's the idea eventually anyways. So if regardless of what acceleration API you want to use... Gallium3D, OpenCL, VDPAU, XvBA, etc then you can get your acceleration.

If somebody creates any sort of hardware that accelerates what Theora uses then I am sure it could be extended to support that also.

And don't forget that although H.264 is patented, Mythtv, ffmpeg, mplayer, and all that stuff is open source and those codecs are used by pretty much every Linux user in existence that want's to watch any sort of common video format.

VA API slowly -- but surely -- making progress

Posted Jul 5, 2009 4:58 UTC (Sun) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link]

Also, w.r.t. patented algorithms, any commercial chip that implements the encoding/decoding that is patented would already have paid the patent licensing fees. So this actually seems like a way to work around that particular problem by offloading the patent encumbered process from legally questionable software (in the US anyway) that may be patent infringing to hardware that has already paid the licensing feed.

Or maybe I don't understand this very well.

Note: I'm not advocating software/math patents at all (which is what any patent on an encoding/decoding algorithm inevitably is), but simply providing another P.O.V. that a commercial entity might be interested in.