Video overlay - essential for fast video playback

[Karlos]

karlos

I have to say you are giving a very nice technical argument for overlay not important going forward,

Actually, I've not. I've simply made the case that what you all are calling "overlay" is not a single implementation. I chose the terms "hardware video surface" (the abstract concept), "video texturing" (an implementation) and "overlay" (another implementation) carefully and with good reason. To avoid the same arguing in circles that people seem to be insisting on doing.

however you are missing the main thrust of this whole argument is that CURRENT OS4 SAM users will NOT have proper video playback for a long time due to lack of overlay.

I'm not missing it, I'm confused as to which part of this argument is actually valid. If you own a Sam with a RadeonHD already and you absolutely can't wait for some form of video acceleration, you can opt for an R200 card and shelve your RadeonHD until the work has been done. My R200 (passively cooled, 256MB, 128-bit VGA+DVI) cost me 10 UKP. You might need to reconfigure and get a PCIe SATA card to free up the PCI slot depending on your configuration.

There's no magical legacy overlay feature that can be turned on for RadeonHD users since later RadeonHD cards don't have the feature. And why? Basically, because AMD decided it was obsolete and could find better use for the silicon. It has been replaced by video texturing. In order to use video texturing, you have to have working support for the hardware level 3D. If you can think of a method to implement it that requires no access to the 3D hardware on these cards, I'm sure Hans would love to hear from you as it would surely save him some development man hours.

Incidentally, I do find it strange that the people making the most noise about this aren't generally Sam users.

So, for Sam, A1, and Peg2 OS4 users Overlay is far from Obselete. Actually its Critical.

All I can say to you is re-read the various threads that have discussed this to death already and understand the difference between overlay as a concept, ie "hardware video surface" and "overlay" as the specific hardware implementation of that concept. Not a single person in any of the numerous threads across various forums has stated that "overlay" (hardware video surface) are obsolete, even if you have ample CPU power to do it all in software to a framebuffer.

[Karlos]

cough cough, strange indeed as the same people show up on every OS4.x related thread as well.

It's Piru's thread and it's not specifically about OS4. People barging in with (false) statements amounting to "SAM HAS NO POSSIBLE OVERLAY! OMGZOR SLOW VID 4EVR SUXXOR!11! TEH PEG2 FTW!!11!" and others turning it into which-developers-are-more-qualified-to-comment spoiled what was actually a perfectly reasonable discussion about the relative merits and implementation details of different methods of providing hardware assist for video playback.

[Karlos]

I tried composting 720p on my Lite-Brite.

Great quality, but I hear the response time sucks

[Karlos]

Indeed. But maybe if the performance was their biggest concern they would have chosen AmigaOne instead, no?

Well, I expect they would have bought something beefier but there is a big price difference (assuming you mean the AmigaOne X1000, second hand A1XE or Peg2 machines are a bit scarce it seems). Not having altivec is a bit of a pain for Sam machines.

Hans' compositing demo (the boing ball redux one) had some actual pixel shader effects going on that I believe he had to manually implement. However, if this programmability can be exposed to developers through the RadeonHD.resource in future drivers, the potential exists for player implementing decode on GPU, even if it ends up having to be painfully implemented in whatever AMD's equivalent of nVidia's PTX assembler is. In that case, the performance of the CPU would become pretty much irrelevant.