#238 Can libvdpau go in Fedora?
Closed None Opened 14 years ago by jwilson.

VDPAU is the Video Decode and Presentation API for UNIX[1][2], put together by nVidia, to give UNIX something similar to Windows' PureVideo GPU-based video decoding. There is a fully open-source library applications can be built against to take advantage of VDPAU, call (oddly enough) libvdpau[3][4]. The catch is that, at least currently, the only way to make use of it is when paired with nVidia's binary video driver, which Fedora obviously doesn't ship, so one could argue this package has no place in Fedora either.

However, packages that are in Fedora could be built with support for VDPAU via libvdpau if it were in Fedora, and made use of if the user opted to install the nVidia binary driver. I'm not certain if this sort of support could be added via plugins/libraries built outside of Fedora, for things like gstreamer-based applications, or if there are programs that need to be built against libvdpau in Fedora in order to support VDPAU...

Also, it appears that VDPAU has grown support to operate as a backend to VAAPI[5], which further clouds the issue -- packages built with VAAPI support would gain VDPAU support that way, rather than requiring libvdpau...

So my question, as noted in the summary, is whether or not libvdpau is a package we think is okay for inclusion in Fedora. Its currently under review here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=490988

[1] http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/185.18.31/README/appendix-h.html

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU

[3] http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/VDPAU

[4] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~aplattner/libvdpau/

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Acceleration_API


Would like to try to discuss this and get an answer in Friday's FESCo meeting.

Something else that is worth adding, we have libXNVCtrl* in the repos which is sole purpose is interacting with the nvidia binary drivers.

So if FESCo says no here this should be dropped too.

*

This packages contains the libXNVCtrl library from the nvidia-settings application. This library provides the NV-CONTROL API for communicating with the proprietary NVidia xorg driver. This package does not contain the nvidia-settings tool itself as that is included with the proprietary drivers themselves.

Given libXVNCtrl library, I suppose this is OK to go in. That being said, looking at the code... there's essentially nothing here. All the real bits are in the closed backends.

This proposal was deferred, until a concrete policy statement can be come up with, taking into account the similar items that already exsits.

Leaving on the agenda for this week, in the event that the statement has been come up with.

This https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-August/msg01117.html is IMHO a valid argument to include it even if there is no open implementation yet.

So there's still no such policy statement? Then let's defer it again.

Just FYI, see here:
http://linuxplumbersconf.org/ocw/events/2009/tracks/3

VDPAU vs. VAAPI is being discussed. It's too early to judge the results from that, but it's plausible one could start seeing OSS backends.

I thought that we were already starting to see OSS backends for VAAPI (at least that's what adamw was saying earlier).

At the 2009-09-04 FESCo meeting, it was decided that libvdpau is acceptable for inclusion in Fedora.

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