[FFmpeg-devel] Added HW accelerated H.264 and HEVC encoding for AMD GPUs based on AMF SDK

[Mironov, Mikhail]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ffmpeg-devel [mailto:ffmpeg-devel-bounces at ffmpeg.org] On Behalf
> Of wm4
> Sent: September 29, 2017 12:57 PM
> To: ffmpeg-devel at ffmpeg.org
> Subject: Re: [FFmpeg-devel] Added HW accelerated H.264 and HEVC
> encoding for AMD GPUs based on AMF SDK
> 
> On Fri, 29 Sep 2017 15:04:00 +0000
> "Mironov, Mikhail" <Mikhail.Mironov at amd.com> wrote:
> 
> > I would like to understand better the nature of the concern. The license is
> MIT. The paragraph in question is a notice, not limiting the usage of the SDK.
> > I can definitely reduce number of headers. I can merge all necessary
> interfaces into one header, though maintenance will take more resources.
> Which way would you prefer?
> 
> Ideally, these headers would just be easily installable by whoever wants to
> build FFmpeg with AMF. This is how it works normally for external libraries.
> 
> I don't even understand why we added those NVIDIA and avisynth headers
> (the other things in compat are for basic OS compatibility, so not
> comparable). For NVIDIA in particular it's probably because installing their
> SDK is a major PITA and there was something about license issues.
> Maybe someone else could chime in why this was done?
> 
> At least for nvenc there was an explanation given in the commit message:
> 
>     As Nvidia has put the most recent Video Codec SDK behind a double
>     registration wall, of which one needs manual approval of a lenghty
>     application, bundling this header saves everyone trying to use NVENC
>     from that headache.
> 
>     The header is still MIT licensed and thus fine to bundle with ffmpeg.
> 
>     Not bundling this header would get ffmpeg stuck at SDK v6, which is
>     still freely available, holding back future development of the NVENC
>     encoder.
> 
> So basically, NVIDIA being... let's say, "not nice". I don't think this will be a
> problem with AMD.
> 
> Again, we generally don't add headers for external libraries in-tree.
I understand your concerns but keeping AMF headers outside of FFmpeg tree would put Nvidia into unfair advantage. And this will happen only because they obscured access to their SDK. I plan to resubmit the patch with a single header file with reduced AMF API. The license will be pure MIT.  Mikhail