[FFmpeg-devel] AMD external header

[James Almer]

On 11/27/2017 12:00 AM, Mironov, Mikhail wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: ffmpeg-devel [mailto:ffmpeg-devel-bounces at ffmpeg.org] On Behalf
>> Of Carl Eugen Hoyos
>> Sent: November 26, 2017 9:36 PM
>> To: FFmpeg development discussions and patches <ffmpeg-
>> devel at ffmpeg.org>
>> Subject: Re: [FFmpeg-devel] AMD external header
>>
>> 2017-11-27 3:32 GMT+01:00 Mironov, Mikhail
>> <Mikhail.Mironov at amd.com>:
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: ffmpeg-devel [mailto:ffmpeg-devel-bounces at ffmpeg.org] On
>> Behalf
>>>> Of Carl Eugen Hoyos
>>
>>>> Also, imo you have not really explained which users would have an
>>>> advantage if FFmpeg includes the AMD header.
>>>
>>> It is more a question to people who included NVidia headers.
>>
>> I don't think my question can be answered by Nvidia users or developers.
>> You are the exclusive recipient for my question.
>>
>>> It was for convenience, isn't it?
>>
>> That is possible and I assume you want the AMD headers added for
>> convenience but that wasn't my question.
> 
> In my many years of using FFmpeg as a library and as a tool I saw a lot of people who build FFmpeg 
> on they own as I do. One, but not all reasons for a custom build is desire to debug whole application 
> with one tool and on Windows many people still use Visual Studio so they make a build with VS, 
> which is not available in places like zeranoe. 
> Another reason is to make minimum feature set needed to their app.
> At the same time for many real-time applications a software encoder is not an option. 
> So these developers will appreciate default support for both GPUs. Everything related to 
> game streaming (OBS), DVR, could gaming, wireless virtual reality etc. are use cases and real users behind.
> Again we are talking about ease of access, not about impossibility.
> I would like to see that people set few parameters and encoding would happen without additional going through hoops.

Nobody is against adding AMD specific encoders and hwaccels. The issue
for some seems to be the inclusion of external headers.

Currently, nothing in our policy is against it, and as I and Philip
already stated, your additions shouldn't be gated on a potential future
policy change about bundled headers, so your patch can initially go in
with the header.

> I also noticed that recently there is a lot of activity to add full Nvidia decoders  to FFmpeg (VC1, MPEG4, VP8, VP9 etc.). 
> I am guessing this is to overcome DXVA or VAAPI shortcoming. What about AMD? We also have them.

Simply put, those developers wanted to write those features.

dxva2 and d3d11va work just fine with AMD hardware, for that matter. And
nobody stops you or anyone to write similar hwaccels for AMD specific APIs.