[mythtv-users] OPen source video card support (Was:Is NVIDIA worth the bother?)

[Simon Hobson]

Eric Sharkey wrote:

>If there's a card with an open source driver that works and gets the
>job done with 70% CPU load and another card with a binary blob driver
>that gets the job done with 6% CPU load, I'd go with the open source
>one every time.

Unfortunately that's not likely to happen at all now.

Thanks to the bunch of <insert your own derogative term> in the movie 
studios, and Microshaft bending over and taking it, pretty well any 
decent video cards now are NOT going to have an open API and are NOT 
going to be documented and are NOT going to be easy to reverse 
engineer a driver.

In order to be "Vista certified" a video card needs to incorporate 
stuff designed to make then less reliable as well as having 
undocumented stuff that the real driver can use to detect if the card 
is being tampered with. The end result is that we aren't likely to 
see any decent cards with enough published documentation to write a 
proper open driver.

And all this <insert expletive of choice> to implement HDCP.

-- 
Simon Hobson

Visit http://www.magpiesnestpublishing.co.uk/ for books by acclaimed
author Gladys Hobson. Novels - poetry - short stories - ideal as
Christmas stocking fillers. Some available as e-books.