Citação:
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. Read more details in this Phoronix exclusive.
For many years, AMD Linux users have wanted open-source UVD/video-acceleration support to go along with their open-source OpenGL driver. However, it never came until now -- many years after UVD first arrived back in the ATI days. The official reasoning for years was that it's complicated to get any public documentation or open-source code since documenting UVD/UVD2 in the public domain could potentially compromise the Digital Rights Management abilities of their Catalyst driver on other operating systems. Obviously it's in AMD's best business interest to cater towards the much larger Windows market where Digital Rights Management for protected video content is critical, so it's been a sticky and drawn out situation getting open-source UVD support.
AMD has said they were working on some open-source UVD solution for many months, but it was complicated getting legal clearance and frankly many Linux desktop users lost hope of seeing hardware-accelerated video playback outside of the Catalyst blob (in March of last year is when we shared that UVD was going through code review). Thus it was a very huge and welcome surprise when receiving an advance and exclusive notice from AMD a few hours ago. Alex Deucher of AMD shared with Phoronix that tomorrow (3 April, or possibly in the late hours tonight), there will be a code drop of open-source UVD Linux support.
Alex has graciously allowed Phoronix to share this information early with our readers, many of whom will be really excited now that there's finally support for offloading the video playback process to the GPU.
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