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

[Marc Randolph]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Simon Hobson <linux at thehobsons.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.

Howdy Simon,

I don't know how much HDCP is a factor in keeping the API closed -
after all, Intel is doing their best to open their video stuff up.  Of
course, even if HDCP didn't exist at all, competitive pressures would
likely keep Nvidia and AMD/ATI stuff closed - for the same reasons
that Broadcom and Marvell keep their stuff closed.  If they think that
exposing any information (be it APIs, or datasheets, or whatever)
would help the competition in even the slightest way, their deluded
paranoia usually prevents them from opening up at all.

Have fun,

   Marc