Blizzard: HTML5 video and H.264 - what history tells us and why we're standing with the web [LWN.net]

Blizzard: HTML5 video and H.264 - what history tells us and why we're standing with the web

Posted Jan 25, 2010 19:28 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
In reply to: Blizzard: HTML5 video and H.264 - what history tells us and why we're standing with the web by nhippi
Parent article: Blizzard: HTML5 video and H.264 - what history tells us and why we're standing with the web

I don't keep up to date on low-level systems programming anymore, so I've two questions that might be obvious:

1. Are the codecs in unwritable memory on the cards? Or do they get put there by injecting binary blobs into the cards on bootup/upgrade? If the latter, then we should replace those binardy blobs with free software. So that "solution" only works if we accept binary blobs?

2. Say I want to encode a video into H.264, and say I want to modify a H.264 video and save it in another format. Wouldn't I need H.264 software on my harddisk for these tasks? The blob in my video card wouldn't do this for me, would it? (I know these tasks aren't what Firefox does, but if we accept it for online video, we'll be stuck with it for other things)

Right? Wrong?

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Blizzard: HTML5 video and H.264 - what history tells us and why we're standing with the web

Posted Jan 25, 2010 19:46 UTC (Mon) by Oddscurity (guest, #46851) [Link] (2 responses)

The way I understand it: nVidia's VDPAU doesn't even do all of the decoding
on the GPU, it just accelerates some parts like colour conversion,
deblocking and other parts of the inner loop.

So it's still software, part of which runs on the CPU as implemented in the
driver, and part of which ends up running on the GPU.

Blizzard: HTML5 video and H.264 - what history tells us and why we're standing with the web

Posted Jan 25, 2010 19:54 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Yeah.

Like stated above there are 22 different companies involved in the Mpeg
group. And if the GSM folks are any indication of how these sort of industry
'IP' groups operate they do everything they can to shovel as many patents
into the pool as possible.

So it's likely that there are dozens and dozens of patents covering all
sorts of different aspects of the codecs, and software and hardware related
to the codecs. So even if the video card folks build codecs-as-hardware they
still only likely take a some patents out of the equation and not all of
them. Meaning that even with hardware acceleration your still not going to
escape from the licensing requirements.

Blizzard: HTML5 video and H.264 - what history tells us and why we're standing with the web

Posted Jan 25, 2010 21:02 UTC (Mon) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]

> The way I understand it: nVidia's VDPAU doesn't even do all of the decoding
> on the GPU, it just accelerates some parts like colour conversion,
> deblocking and other parts of the inner loop.

I believe that is what the early VDPAU versions did. Later versions offload full decoding to the video card. Then again, this is based on external observations of cpu load rather than knowing what the VDPAU library really does..