[mythtv-users] Current wisdom on PVR-150/250/350/500

Joe Votour joevph at yahoo.com
Mon Apr 17 05:11:24 UTC 2006



--- "Michael T. Dean" <mtdean at thirdcontact.com> wrote:

> On 04/17/2006 12:11 AM, Joe Votour wrote:
> > Believe me, their competition could learn a great
> deal
> > from just their drivers, since drivers are an
> > interface to the hardware.  As an example, the
> > competition might see in the driver some great way
> to
> > shrink down a transfer of data implemented in the
> > driver (which exposes how the hardware works), and
> > decide to then add that logic to their next
> graphics
> > chip.
> 
> I really think this argument is like the argument
> that software 
> copy-protection schemes prevent piracy.  Generally,
> they only stop the 
> people that aren't the problem (end users) instead
> of stopping those 
> with the time/interest/equipment/money (large-scale
> pirates, or the 
> competition).
> 

Wow, we're now w-a-y off-topic.  :)

I agree.  Copy protection doesn't stop the determined
pirate.  I'll admit to having cracked a couple of old
Commodore 64 games that I bought because the darned
blue on maroon code pages really annoyed me.

> In other words, good luck trying to convince me that
> ATI isn't paying a 
> team of developers to reverse engineer NVIDIA's
> drivers /and/ hardware 
> (and vice versa).  After all, look how closely
> capabilities and even 
> designs have been tracking over the years.  I don't
> think that's 
> completely the "free market" effect ensuring the
> people get what they want.
> 

I wouldn't even try to convince you.  But, I would
counter by saying that the committees who make
decisions on what features are to be included in the
newest versions of DirectX and OpenGL mainly determine
the capabilities (which in turn, drive the designs). 
And, they probably are paying teams to
reverse-engineer the drivers.

> And, as a matter of fact, binary-only drivers aren't
> even stopping end 
> users from (at least partially) reverse engineering
> the 
> drivers--reference the Windows Omega Drivers ( 
> http://www.omegadrivers.net/ ) and other similar
> projects.
> 

No, binary drivers aren't stopping them.  Back when I
was in my teenage years, I used to
disassemble/reverse-engineer quite a few programs
written in 6510 assembly language to figure out what
they do (and how they do it).  However, that's trivial
compared trying to reverse-engineer something written
in C/C++ nowadays.  The key is to be able to keep the
competition out long enough to bridge them to the next
design (which has some newer code to go with it).

I don't like the binary-only drivers situation a whole
lot myself.  But, I can understand the business
perspective -  as a software developer in a startup, I
know that I'd be pretty pissed if my company gave away
our "intellectual property", even to customers who
bought our hardware, without taking steps to ensure
that it wasn't properly locked up.

-- Joe

> Mike
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