[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] VIA hardware support in MPlayer

[Ivor Hewitt]

On Monday 25 Apr 2005 16:43, Guillaume Poirier wrote:
> On 4/25/05, Ivor Hewitt <ivor at ivor.org> wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > That's probably a worthless announcement, but did anyone here had a
> > > look at the patch that VIA did against MPlayer-pre5 to support VIA
> > > hardware?
> > > Ok, we all agree that this version is _really old_, and that VIA would
> > > have been better of contributing to Unichrome rather than forking
> > > MPlayer...
> > > Anyway, here's the link for their patch:
> > > http://sourceforge.net/projects/vemp/
> >
> > The via patch simply provides support for their proprietary binary mpeg
> > interface. A better route would be to add support for the completely open
> > source unichrome interface.
>
> What is the status of the hardware support? Does it compete with their
> binary drivers?

In what sense? The open source driver provides support for mpeg2 playback on 
both the unichrome and unichrome-pro chipsets. Mpeg4 accel is not 
implemented, but at the last benchmark test the unichrome driver in software 
outperformed the via binary driver with hardware accel. 

> What's new now that VIA released their source code?
>
The code they have released is not new. It still contains many bugs, and 
requires applications that use the hardware acceleration run with root 
privileges.

They still have not released the source code to their mpeg interface and 
you'll see that their "open source" driver package still contains an opaque 
binary driver whose contents are apparently a "commercial secret". An 
interesting and novel interpretation of the term "open source". 

> > The patch for that has been submitted to this list several times already.
>
> Did it get merged into MPlayer's CVS?
> If not, well, that's sad... A great deal of people building mini-itx
> based divx box use that kind of hardware.
>
No it didn't. There seemed to be little interest or backing for it.