AMD Open-Sources Video Encode Engine 34
An anonymous reader writes "AMD's latest feature added to their open-source Radeon DRM graphics driver is VCE video encoding via a large code drop that happened this morning. A patched kernel and Mesa will now allow the Radeon driver with their latest-generation hardware to provide low-latency H.264 video encoding on the GPU rather than CPU. The support is still being tuned and it only supports the VCE2 engine but the patches can be found on the mailing list until they land in the trunk in the coming months."
Re:binary driver (Score:4, Informative)
From the mailing list, it appears you still need to link this all to a closed source binary...
No, it's firmware/microcode. The driver sends it to the GPU at boot as a blob, it lives inside the card hidden from everything. The alternative would be to have an EEPROM and a firmware flashing utility, it'd still be there and closed source but it wouldn't be in the driver. It's not really part of the programming model, it's hardware initialization/configuration/tweaks to make the it work correctly according to the model.
Re:Holy shit (Score:4, Informative)
They have decoding support, but at least as recently as Google Summer of Code 2013 [multimedia.cx] they don't have hardware encoding support. That seems to be the fault of the ffmpeg project though, encoding was added to the VA API in June 2009. Lack of interest?