XBMC Developers Criticize AMD's Linux Driver 212
An anonymous reader writes "It's not only the NVIDIA Linux driver that has been publicly slammed over lacking support; the AMD Catalyst driver is now facing scrutiny from developers of the XBMC media and entertainment software. The developers aren't happy with AMD due to not properly supporting video acceleration under Linux. The AMD Linux driver is even lacking support for MPEG2 video acceleration and newer levels of H.264. AMD reportedly has the support coded, but they're refusing to turn it on in their public Linux driver."
"Refusing to turn it on" (Score:2, Interesting)
To me, the most interesting part of the summary was:
AMD reportedly has the support coded, but they're refusing to turn it on in their public Linux driver
The relevant point from the article seems to be
Our sources say that these features are implemented in fglrx since a long time, but simply not activated within the driver. Nobody seems to know why.
Forgive me for being skeptical with Phoronix, but does anyone with more direct knowledge of these "sources" want to comment? I'd like to have a better view of the situation than just the words "Our sources."
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Throwing the bird (Score:2)
was annoying on XBMC for me (Score:4, Interesting)
I usually don't pay too close of attention to ATI vs Nvidia war, but I had built out a slick HTPC machine to run xbmc on Linux, and videos had all sorts of problems on the ATI card.. especially with decent quality videos. Hitching, crashing, general instability despite trying different drivers and config combinations.
Threw in a fanless nvidia, VDPAU works fine, totally different experience.
So, I'll stick with Nvidia on Linux for anything more serious than web browsing; their closed source binary driver is a little obnoxious, but at least it works.
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Probably not a terrible idea - don't they tend to have lower power consumption / run cooler? I got this thing for my xbmc box;
http://www.quietpc.com/products/vga-cards/msi-n210-md512h [quietpc.com]
Fanless, which is nice for noise.
Re:was annoying on XBMC for me (Score:4, Informative)
I'm running XBMC on an Asus EeeBox 1021P (Atom 510 w/ Nvidia ION2 graphics). Built the thing up with Debian, running Diskless no-less, and it is a fantastic HTPC. It will hapilly play whatever video files I throw at it, be they BluRay rips, high bitrate 1080p video, lower video, etc... The Nvidia closed source drivers, as built by the Debian packages, work well, and VDPAU works great. The great irony is that XBMC seems to draw less CPU time when running a 1080p video than it does displaying its own menus.
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I have the same exact setup, Debian as well. Works great.
Their wishlist (Score:3)
What kind of piss-poor cpu can't decode mpeg2 in several times realtime?
The article implies h.264 acceleration for levels less-than-or-equal-to 4.1 works fine as well. Scene rules for x264 releases say respect 4.1, and most hardware players top out at that as well... so who's clamoring for it, and why?
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That's not the point. Offloading to a GPU for built in HW decoding means low power CPUs can control full HD media without breaking into a sweat. You don't need a full HTPC when you can have a simple and 100x cheaper SoC. Scene isn't everything, 4.1 hasn't been the baselines for several years even if the spec itself covers what the scene release.
Re:Their wishlist (Score:5, Informative)
What kind of piss-poor cpu can't decode mpeg2 in several times realtime?
An Atom struggles to play 1080P MPEG-2, and you can forget 1080P H.264. Whereas my Xbmc box with an Atom and Nvidia Ion chipset has no problem with anything we've thrown at it.
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Wish I could say the same. I have no idea if it is myth, X11, the kernel, or what, but I keep getting artifacts when trying to use my ION to play HD video. It varies considerably based on where the stream came from, and what software I'm using to play it...
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1920x1080 MPEG2 is actually still challenging (e.g. ATSC content).
'Scene' rules haven't stopped me from getting higher profiles on various pieces of content.
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My xbmc setup (Score:3)
I'm currently using a mac mini with the Intel i910 driver and a broadcom crystalhd mini-pci-E card. 1920x1080, both CPUs run at about 30% decoding 1080p. Works very well for me.
AMD vs nVidia video acceleation (Score:2)
They might have some support in the drivers, but Linux video acceleration is a clusterfuck, some really convoluted setup that makes PulseAudio/ALSA look like a sane design.
In Windows, video players will simply drop to software decoding if it can hardware decode, but in Linux, the video pla
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Blame DRM (Score:3, Informative)
Their video acceleration hardware has DRM built into it. The reason they can't release the specs is most likely because their lawyers said not to, for fear of breaking some DRM-related legal contract(s).
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The reason they can't release the specs is most likely because their lawyers said not to, for fear of breaking some DRM-related legal contract(s).
I can't imagine how that would be a problem though. DRM relies on having some system that the content publisher can trust, which the user doesn't have control over or visibility into. The Linux video acceleration APIs probably allow a separate process to read the final frames from the video framebuffer, so the opensource driver can't decode any DRM'ed content on Linux. That's fine. Why is it then a problem to allow decoding of non-encumbered content? The only way I can imagine it would be a problem is if th
Switchable Grpahics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Switchable Grpahics (Score:4, Interesting)
The big problem there is that X itself doesn't have infrastructure to support switchable graphics sanely. There is some work being done to provide a Hot-Swap API into X11 to address this problem so at least then there will be a way to at least start to get this working in X.
The other big factor is that most of these switchable graphics solutions are proprietary per laptop. Some use a physical mux to switch the display back and forth between integrated and discrete cards. Some don't and use a purely SW solution where the discrete card renders offscreen, then has its output copied into system memory for compositing by the integrated card. Windows 7 sort of supports this now in their driver model with their WDDM compositor.
I'm sure something could eventually be worked on in Linux but there isn't any standard X driver model really created to make this work. I don't blame either company for not spending that much effort to get this working given the current marketshare of linux on laptops (which I think is pretty close to 0% as sold by OEMs). It makes me a bit sad, but until X gets support to make this whole switchable graphics thing a first class citizen I doubt either company will have much official support for this.
If Linux laptops were a big market segment and the manufacturers were clamoring for switchable Linux graphics because end users were willing to pay for it then you'd probably see this feature emerge. Sadly the market probably doesn't appear large enough to justify major investment.
Also do the open source AMD driver or Noveua support any sane form of switchable graphics? Or are they also stuck on X11's lack of a good API for this?
Personal experience (Score:2)
For me, out of nVidia and ATI proprietary drivers under linux, ATI's were always more problematic, especially under 64 bit Ubuntu.
Every couple years I try to get an ATI card and make linux work with it and every time I get very frustrated (last one was 5830 card in 2010 [hyperom.com]). Yes, I don't have much expertise in kernel hacking, but I don't expect that I have to do that much tweaking to install a freaking driver. So far nVidia never presented a problem under Ubuntu. It might re-compile itself, but that's as bad a
So you blame AMD instead of MPLA? (Score:3)
H.264 patent: The last expiration is US 7826532 on 29 nov 2027
MPEG-2 patent: The last expiration is US 7334248 in 2026 (but if 6181712 is held to be prior art, move that up to 2018)
Otherwise there are per unit royalties without a Microsoft to pre-pay them for you so the OS itself pays no royalties for the driver (or you pay for the driver, or you drive the chip cost up relative to Intel, for whom Microsoft also pays the royalty).
-- Terry
THIS is why you can't have nice things! (Score:3)
Actually, this is why you can't have source code to the binary blobs.
-- Terry
AMD Posted on LLVM/Clang for R600 Linux Driver (Score:4, Insightful)
Irony (Score:3)
I chose an HTPC with AMD processor and graphics over the one with Intel/nVIDIA, thinking it would have better Linux support, and an nVIDIA based Android tablet thinking it will get good OEM and driver support. Turns out that now I am stuck with both.
Re:Why should they? (Score:4, Insightful)
What leeches? The drivers don't cost the user anything extra (far as I know?). If I've already paid for the hardware, I expect drivers that work and support all the functionality, and there is no valid excuse for any hardware manufacturer to withhold them.
Re:Why should they? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, drivers advertised as available at the time you purchased the hardware should be available and supported well enough. Drivers not advertised, on the other hand... OEMs can't support each and every OS, kernel version, ... especially when the market share is marginal, and revenue almost nil.
I understand that sucks and, frankly, it's the main thing that' keeping me away, again and again, from Linux. But I also understand that companies are not charities and have to make a business case for investing $$$ in dev and support. Especially when, as is probably the case here, there's 3rd party IP in the mix, which would cost a lot to buy out and "open", or replicate w/o getting embroiled in endless lawsuits.
Re:Why should they? (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you care to explain how AMD/ATI's revenue is different because I choose to use Linux instead of windows?
I still paid the same amount of money for the card.
Furthermore, we all know for a fact (because it's happened for every other piece of hardware) that if they released the details needed for the Linux community to write it's own drivers, they'd never have to write another one for Linux, ever, AND they would benefit from being able to take the concepts and optimizations created by the Linux community and fold them into their windows drivers.
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Would you care to explain how AMD/ATI's revenue is different because I choose to use Linux instead of windows? I still paid the same amount of money for the card.
Furthermore, we all know for a fact (because it's happened for every other piece of hardware) that if they released the details needed for the Linux community to write it's own drivers, they'd never have to write another one for Linux, ever, AND they would benefit from being able to take the concepts and optimizations created by the Linux community and fold them into their windows drivers.
I'll bite, although I generally agree with you and will make a different case in a minute.
Their given revenue may currently be based off of a model where they spend X number of person hours on developing drivers for given hardware and devoting those hours to the less common user base of Linux in the degree to which it would theoretically be necessary would take more than the given hours.
On the second point, if they were to release all of their hardware specs, then, it's theoretically possible for someone wi
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So why don't you write a business plan based on that data, and send it to AMD so that they know about all the profit they're missing?
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Writing drivers is not free. It costs money to hire and pay a development team.
AMD/nVidia would love it if everyone used one version of Windows (even Windows has driver compatibility problems between versions - Vista/7 drivers don't always work on XP/2K, and never on 95/98/ME, and so on). Not to mention 32-bit/64-bit drivers. They would cut their driver development costs dramatically.
On the other hand, users would love it if they supported every single revision of even the most niche OS, from Mac OS 9 to Mi
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Simple, the number of people wanting Linux support is less. So AMD does not make revenue (in the future) by supporting and serving Linux customers well.
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distros don't matter if you put the the driver in f'ing kernal where it belongs
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We don't need them to spend money developing Linux drivers; we only need them to stop throwing roadblocks in the way so that others can write and maintain them. That's the way Linux has always worked. The only cost to the manufacturers is proper documentation, which must already exist internally (or so one would hope).
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OEMs can't support each and every OS, kernel version, ... especially when the market share is marginal, and revenue almost nil.
Well, it's been argued that the whole Linux ecosystem can't possibly exist for just that reason, much like flight for bees being aerodynamically impossible. And yet, there they are. Drives you nuts every time you update your OS and software, doesn't it?
Re:Why should they? (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows users don't pay for their video drivers. Both Windows and Linux users have paid the same amount for the hardware, though. You must be kind of stupid.
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But 100,000 Windows users have paid $1 of their final purchase price to software development. 10,000 Linux users have paid $1 of their final purchase price to software development. (It's hyperbole for an example.) Each user has paid the same amount for hardware but the "Develop Windows Drivers" pool has $90k more in it.
Re:Why should they? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fine. Don't support Linux. If you say you support Linux, then REALLY support it. There shouldn't be a middle ground in this issue. It's pretty simple.
Re:Why should they? (Score:5, Insightful)
He was replying to the AC that was apparently saying Linux shouldn't be supported because those users don't pay for software (generally). The AC which you replied to was simply pointing out the original AC's argument was faulty because Windows users don't pay for the software in question either. However, both Windows and Linux users paid the same price for the hardware, the price of which includes support for the drivers. If they offer Linux drivers, then it's only fair to expect the same level of support offered for other platforms.
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We liked you better when you were posting as an A.C. Obviously the same person.
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If it says it supports that OS on the outside of the box then YES, I DO expect it to be included.
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> Why should they support Linux leeches? Get a job and pay for your software losers and then maybe you'd see some support.
This is HARDWARE you moron. Everyone that has the hardware has PAID for it you moron. Get back under your bridge.
Linus may want to cuss out the guys at Nvidia but they're doing a better job in this case.
Re:Why should they? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why should they support Linux leeches?
There's a reason why all my Linux boxes except the oldest one have either Nvidia or Intel graphics. In the case of the old one I had to manually patch the ATI driver kludge source because ATI dropped support and a kernel change broke it.
So, not a penny of my IT budget has gone to ATI since 2008 because their drivers aren't very good and they don't support them.
Re:Why should they? (Score:4, Insightful)
Intel cooperates with the community. That doesn't mean that their kit is better or that the associated drivers are better. It also doesn't make them a premium option of any kind.
That cooperation also hasn't led to feature or support parity with the Nvidia blob.
Intel is the same sort of force bundled cheap stuff that AMD is.
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A kernel change broke it for a card 4 years old? So the driver worked fine until Linus broke it?
If I remember correctly, the ATI driver was calling a kernel function which they're not supposed to access, and a security fix changed the parameters or visibility for that function so the driver no longer worked.
It wouldn't have mattered, except ATI decided to drop support for the chip so there was no official route to update the driver; I believe that was about two years after I bought the machine.
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A kernel change broke it for a card 4 years old? So the driver worked fine until Linus broke it?
You know, while you have a point, you should take a look at the hardware support list for the nVidia driver, and then compare it to the list for the AMD driver, and it will blow your fucking mind. nVidia manages to maintain support for very old cards, and all in one driver, why can't AMD?
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You can't have it both ways...
As a matter of fact you can. If the source is open, then anyone can propose the fix (to either the driver or the kernel) and even do it themselves. If it's proprietary, then you're shit-out-of-luck unless the vendor sees it in their business interest to make the fix and distribute it. That's what this entire thread illustrates: the video drivers and hardware specs are closed, and so all we can do is plead and whine.
So yes, complaining about a problem in Linux is just the first step along the way to getting
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figures, an AC...
LoB
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People only have finite funds available, if you have a budget of $1000 for a computer and you decide to spend $400 of it on software then you only have a $600 computer.
If you decide to use free software, then you can buy a $1000 computer which will be more powerful.
AMD sell hardware...
Actually I care... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just this past week I rebuilt my HTPC going from Boxee (which orphaned its support of Linux) and went to XBMC. I have personal knowledge of the dumb problems with the Catalyst driver.
XBMC is a project whose users take a lot of advantage of old hardware. The other part are dealing with small form factor hardware. A lot of it does happen to be proprietary garbage. In my case I purchased a Dell Zino [wikipedia.org] several years ago for the task. There isn't much choice about for these items, and rolling you own at this size is often clunky (though a lot more feasible now than 3 or so years ago). You're going to find a lot of Nvidia (no fucking way) and AMD.
So you have one group of people that are re purposing and one group with specialty hardware. Not a lot of hardware choice in either, really.
So, yeah, this is a big deal. There is no real reason from my point of view not to provide a good driver for my platform of choice.
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Re:Actually I care... (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason it is a "poorly supported platform" is that they are CHOOSING to support it poorly.
Re:Actually I care... (Score:5, Insightful)
A Linux Disto is a flavor - it's a set of pre-installed tools, features, etc. It's not a separate OS. Unless you're doing something *really* weird, you should be able to compile the same for the most part. In addition, AMD already stated they were going to open source the drivers, with FULL support - this isn't us just whining because we can, this is us asking AMD to live up to it's own promise.
Re:Actually I care... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Actually I care... (Score:5, Informative)
That might be true for exceptionally poorly programmed versions of proprietary software, but neither ATI nor nvidia target specific distros with their drivers, they target a couple of revisions of the X server's ABI (and a few more for the kernel, which is a simpler task), and current distros pretty much all use the latest available at the time of release (minus one or two for Debian Stable). You're making it at least 100x more complicated than it really is.
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bbbbttttttzzzzzzzzzzz wrong thank you for playing. all they need is to put it in the kernel. there are plenty of binary blobs in there already so don't go pulling that. or do as vmware does with player and workstation provide the necessary bits in tar.gz with a install script written in python
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The only "support" they need to do is document their hardware specifications accurately and publicly. The community will take care of the rest.
People who use Linux for anything other than command line programs are the minority of Linux users.
And people who believe that have no idea what they're talking about.
Re:Actually I care... (Score:4, Informative)
Problem is , many of the bits required for writing a driver are unreleased/undocumented. We couldn't write a driver if we tried when the vendor won't give us the specs required.
Wireless cards are an issue too, with their binary blob drivers.
-nB
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that's pretty fucking pedantic right there...
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"There is no real reason from my point of view not to provide a good driver for my platform of choice."
The Linux community can barely decide standards for themselves. Hence PulseAudio/ALSA/OSS/kDX
They barely get OpenGL right. As of this writing, only one machine in my house is capable of running a fully-functional (as in all my standard programs work without any errors) and it is my early '00s machine. Nothing built after 2006 has support for everything.
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Nvidia (no fucking way)
If you're enough of a dumbass to ignore the right solution (nVidia stuff *works*, binary blob or not, as opposed to ATI's, also binary-blob, braindead crap), you deserve to fail. Every media PC I've built has been nVidia; no problems on the graphics side.
Re:Actually I care... (Score:5, Interesting)
I built my own HTPC, but the hardware appears to be very similar to what you have in your Dell Zino HD.
I am curious, what are the problems you had with the Ati Catalyst driver, and did you ever resolve your issues?
My system is a Jetway NC81-LF ITX board. Onboard Radeon HD 3200, AMD Athlon 64 X2 4850e CPU, 4GB DDR2 SODIMM & 30GB 2.5" HDD all retro fit into and old VHS player (I was bored one day). As an aside I plan to upgrade HDD to SSD soon. Whole system is only about 9GB. All media plays over NFS mount from my primary workstation.
I am running Gentoo Linux (kernel 3.2.12, w/gentoo patchset), Catalyst 12.4, Xorg server 1.11.4 and having no issues with any media. I do not, however, use XBMC, but a custom UI I've been working on that calls mplayer (eventually will be open sourced, currently working on integrating Youtube).
I did have to disable the sideport memory on my board though. If it was turned on I got a lot of tearing in video. I also set mplayer lavdopts threads to 2 (one thread per CPU core).
This setup is capable of playing anything I have ever thrown at it, including direct Bluray 1080p rips with no transcoding, even no issues with fast paced scenes (Disney's Cars & Rio).
mplayer config:
[default]
vo=gl
# force audio over HDMI
ao=alsa:device=plughw=1.3
# multithreaded CPU decoding
lavdopts=threads=2
# set languages
alang=en
slang=en
# disable subtitles
sid=999
Re:Actually I care... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a dumbass troll, but I have to bite this one... how the hell do you figure this true?
We're generally not the people calling support for help, we're the ones finding the answer and sending it in for free.
Now go away and get an push-up pop.
Re:Actually I care... (Score:4, Insightful)
unfortunately the truth is that amd/ati isn't capable of making decent drivers on both windows and linux, their cards seems to be always better than nvidia in terms of price and performance but in reality they rarely works flawlessy, either the driver crashes or the game glitches and you have to wait for some hotfix, there was also a news here on slashdot just a few weeks ago that the windows amd drivers disable dep/aslr otherwise you get a bsod
Re:Oh No (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, only losers have choices.
Yes; seems like I'm a bloody "lucky" winner. I bought a reasonably top end AMD card specifically because they promised open source support. Of course it turns out that only the proprietary driver works properly. Fine "support is coming; they do the right thing and give over the documentation; install it for now and to free later; I don't mind". Except that because it's stupid proprietary code it doesn't get automatically distributed by my distro vendor (today that's Ubuntu; who knows tomorrow). Every time I get an X-org update it breaks.
I really don't care about the high speed graphics most of the time. The free driver will be fine. Just make sure they have the specs so that the colours can be made to come out right on decent monitors and I will buy your stuff. AMD; you almost have our goodwill; You've already made the investment; Just go that last few inches; get it finished and make sure you fully cooperate with the developers. We will pay extra for your stuff. We will be glad to never see NVIDIA again. You will get better integration to Android. This will be worth it.
Re:Oh No (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to be too much of a shill, but this is one area Intel seems to always be better. :-) *
Their Gfx performance may not be up to the other two, but their support is better.
Maybe Intel should takeover nVidia
-nB
* when pigs fly I assume
Re:Oh No (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't need gaming graphics Intel is the place to be in terms of linux support. I know what my next purchase is going to be. I just wish Intel would expand their market and try to compete on the high end. I would love to see chipzilla enter this fight with thier opensource record.
Re:Oh No (Score:4, Insightful)
They tried (larabee IIRC) and failed. Intel == low-end graphics, that is just the way it is.
I wish it were different, but such is the state of affairs. (They are getting better, but really only maintaining the gab, not closing it).
-nB
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IMO Intele never wanted to actually enter the comercial high end 3D world. They do quite a lot of resears but as I see it their interests always reside in creating the know how to scale CPUs horizontally in massive dimensions (10k cores etc.) because they correctly see that this is going to happen. IMHO the graphics series are just a way to monetize their RnD a bit earlier instead of just dumping billions on eggheads for a payday somewhere in the next decade.
Still I'm in full support of what they actually d
Re:Oh No (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think this is quite correct. I used to work at Intel, so maybe things have changed a little since I was there, but as I saw it, the main reasons they entered the 3D market was two-fold: 1) to secure their position in chipsets, and 2) to make money. When I was there (over 6 years ago), they were the world's largest GPU manufacturer. I imagine that hasn't changed. Yes, their GPUs were low-performance compared to the competition, but that wasn't all that important; their goal was to dominate chipsets, and they did then and I believe they still do now (honestly, it seems like very little has changed in the PC world in 6 years; lots has changed in mobile devices (phones, tablets), but not in PCs or laptops). Most PCs don't need high-end GPUs; most PCs are bought from places like Dell, in large quantities, and used in offices for corporate drones to read their Outlook email, write MS Word documents, etc. They only need 3D so they can run the graphical effects in Windows. Many more PCs (probably more laptops these days) are sold to individuals and corporate users, who again use them to read their email, use MS Office, and use a web browser. They only need 3D for graphical effects and to watch videos with GPU rendering. Some might play a low-end game here or there, but most don't. The people who do want to play games probably quickly find out that integrated graphics aren't very good for that, and upgrade to an Nvidia/AMD card, if they didn't do so from the outset.
By having a GPU built-in to their chipsets, they were able to get a lock on much of the chipset market. Instead of a PC buyer need to buy a motherboard w/ chipset, and then a separate graphics card, they could spend a couple bucks more, and get a motherboard with integrated graphics, and forgo the graphics card altogether, saving a bunch of money. Remember, before Intel got into 3D graphics, there were a bunch of chipset makers; these days, many of them seem to have withered away. They couldn't satisfy the low-end users by building an acceptable GPU into their chipsets, so everyone just switched to Intel.
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This statement gets my complete support. Been using Intel i915 for XBMC for at least 3 years and it's been a rock solid experience. I had some initial trouble when the kernel mode setting was introduced (before you needed an app to write to the video bios so you could get the 1920x1080 resolution) but extremely minor and long past, I have to agree, I'll be looking for Intel net time I put together a HTPC.
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I need HD video processing. and Intel sucks at at. Nvidia owns the market at making a video chipset that will render any file format HD without any processor load.
I really wished that intel would get off their arses and make their GFX chipsets not suck.
Re:Oh No (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't really need to; they've already succeeded at getting a giant majority of the chipset market by having an integrated GPU that sucks, but is good enough for average users who do little besides surf the web and maybe use MS Word.
Saying they need to make a GFX chipset that competes with Nvidia's and AMD's mid-to-high-end offerings is like saying KIA needs to make a car that competes with Ferrari. Not that it wouldn't be nice (since Intel's open-source support is so superior to the other guys'), but it's probably not exactly high on their priority list when they're already making buckets of money by covering the low-end market.
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It's not shilling; I point this out from time to time myself. If you want the best-supported GPU on Linux, it's simple: buy Intel. There's absolutely no room to argue this either; it's a plain fact. With the other two, you get either a proprietary driver that may perform well, but doesn't integrate well with the rest of the distro as you've found out the hard way (breaks every time you apply security updates to X or kernel, doesn't support KMS, etc.), or you get an open-source driver that does integrate
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120 char limit :(
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Should try arch, they have even written up a wiki article on how to automatically reinstall fglrx when needed.
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Window managers have nothing to do with drivers.
Video drivers on Linux (for hardware accelerated devices, anyway) have a kernel component and a driver for the X Window System (which isn't a window manager, it's the graphical system). Things like GNOME, KDE, etc. run on top of X and don't care what the underlying driver is, although of course certain features won't work well if you don't have accelerated hardware coupled with a driver that supports it.
OSX doesn't use the X Window System for its main GUI. I
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you need not ask permission for that...
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To be rude, but, that was a dumb question.
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Something beyond "Cats rule and dogs drool" might actually be useful. A developer might even act on it.
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Or, I don't know, you could change the skin if you don't like the default?
Anything specific? (Score:2)
I use XBMC and find it pretty solid. There are things I'd like, mostly not GUI related
-ATSC embedded closed caption support (this feature would make me drop mythfrontend in a *second*)
-No 'headless' xbmc. For central library, an xbmc instance must be running. It does pretty much everything needed to do api calls to do database maintenance, but has to have a display
-A more simplified cookie cutter setup for centralized database. I know a lot of people will say 'PMS', but I've found that less useful (and
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Right, I do that as well, but the tweaks to advacedsettings.xml are non-obvious and could be simplified. If I had time, that would be an area of interest for me to contribute.
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If you're trying to make the joke that Canadian dollars may as well be monopoly money compared to US dollars... I'm afraid to tell you one Canadian dollar is currently worth more than one US dollar. So it takes more than one US dollar to purchase one Canadian dollar. :(
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Actually, it's reverted a few few weeks ago - 1 Canadian dollar buys aorund 97-98 US cents or so.
Anyhow, no more ATI. It's AMD, which is decidedly 'merkin. And AMD has sought to wipe out all reference to ATI as well - it's "AMD Graphics" now.
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I've had the opposite experience. Every ATi card I've gotten in the last 5 years has run beautifully, with two issues:
1) Windows 7 started freaking out about my Radeon x1650 about 6 months after upgrading from WinXP and would only use the basic VGA driver with it. I was long overdue for an upgrade anyway, so I replaced it with a Radeon HD 5450, which has run beautifully ever since.
2) My laptop's ATi card had issues with some distros of Linux when it first came out in 2006. However, by early 2007 it ran with
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Not yet, AMD hasn't opened up the specs of the hardware video decoder for fear of DRM and other problems with it. There is work being done to do the decoding with the shader processor and it sort of works for mpeg2 (at least for me anyway) but not for anything more advanced. For the nvidia open source drivers i believe it's the same situation.
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The ridiculous thing is, the video decoding portion of the hardware operates on a video stream which is already decrypted, so in order to use it you must have already cracked any drm scheme, or be viewing drm-free video.
Or you could always decode the stream in software using the CPU... Or even using a different part of the GPU through OpenCL...
There is no sensible reason why opening up the specs of the video decoding would make it any easier to crack a drm scheme.
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The "protected path" has squat to do with video that has no DRM on it. Either they can release the necessary information or they botched their design very badly.
> ts a mess folks, and the sooner you accept there is a problem the sooner you can start to work to change it.
I just avoid the problem by not buying ATI gear. That's the beauty of a free market. If someone drops the ball, I can choose something else. You don't get away from the problem of shoddy gear just because you're running the monopoly produ
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Nice rant. Any relevance to the topic at hand ?
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Calling them assholes doesn't affect anything, one way or another.
Seriously, this is basically a tech forum. The people that make the decisions at AMD don't read it and wouldn't care if they heard that /. readers were bashing them. AMD is used to being bashed - they've been at war with Intel for over twenty years.
Meanwhile, the intelligent companies will support Linux when it makes financial sense to do so. Most hardware does not have the legal and technical hassles that video cards have, and companies c