Asus Ati Radeon 7700 2GB card, no VC-1 HW support?

1st Official Post

    Hi, noticed that there is no VDPAU VC-1 HW support on my Asus ATi Radeon 2GB Graphics Card, If I enable VC-1 under VDPAU HW, the picture is bad, cant see much.

    If I disable the VC-1 HW under VDPAU, the picture is perfect again...

    Is it the card not supporting VC-1 HW encoding, or something in Libreelec having trouble?

    Only tried the latest LE 8.2.5 so far.....

    Dont have any problems with VDPAU HW VC-1 support on my other computers running Nvidia card: GT 520, GT 610, Gt 710, GT 730, GTX 660...

    I thought Radeon card did support VC-1? especially the 7 series, did I miss something

    • Official Post

    AMD graphics support has been a tombola for years, some cards work, some don't. All because AMD driver support for Linux was virtually non-existent for years. Things are changing for the newest AMD graphics, although you will need the newest Linux kernels & Mesa drivers.Yes, Nvidia has been VDPAU-friendly for years, but that will stop as per LibreELEC 10.

    You can try Milhouse's Generic 'bleeding edge' build here.

    Quote from hundrakg

    Sorry to ask,dont follow, why will it stop? will there be no support(VDPAU) for Nvidia cards with LibreELEC 10?

    Development Update – LibreELEC

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/vdpau

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/nvidia_nvdec

    It's basically all about the open source software philosophy. Nvidias open source software solution VDPAU is superseded by proprietary NVDEC which relies on proprietary Nvidia drivers and because that's not a wide supported standard like VAAPI they punish Nvidia users for buying this kind of hardware./shrug

    So in the end either oss developers have more work to integrate and maintain a special Nvidia only software decoder or otherwise Nvidia has to change his open source policy and release some suitable open source drivers. As both is unlikely you better think about a hardware upgrade. Intel or AMD offer a lot of suitable low power CPU that work very well in a HTPC.

    Beside that... you own this card? HD7770-2GD5 | Grafikkarten | ASUS Deutschland if you do then VC-1 should be supported by UVD but for linux still vdpau is used to decode this type of media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/unified_video_decoder#linux

    I've checked the mesa-vdpau libs & LE 9.0 comes with all needed libs so try LibreELEC (Leia) v8.90.005 ALPHA – LibreELEC this new Alpha build and check if your card is working.

    OK, many thing to read, getting a bit confused....

    I only use LE Kodi to play internal Videos 1080p(H.264 and VC-1), So I guess LE 8 is more the enough for me as long as I only do this and have my "older" hardware.....

    From My understanding: the newer LE 9? and LE 10 will not support HW encoding with some older graphics-cards like GT 5-7 series and GTX 6 series?

    Also this new NVDEC is only supported in newer card ?

    Kodi 19 will probably ditch VDPAU support in favor or VAAPI. Nvidia does not support VAAPI so there will no more Nvidia support in the future. LE10 will be based on Kodi 19 so it will also drop Nvidia support.

    You can savely upgrade to LE9 since it still supports VDPAU and Nvidia. It is possible that LE9 handles VC-1 HW decoding properly because it uses newer software libraries and newer drivers for your AMD card. So try the new builds and see if anything improves.

    If you don't mind software decoding and probably higher cpu load then stick to LE8.2.5 and you will be also fine.

    That makes my wunders to clarification.... Now I think I understand.

    YES, I do software decode VC-1 in my 7770 card, load is around 25-35% as highest in my CPU (AMD A8 6600K), so no major problems,,,

    When its time for Kodi 19 and LE10, I think I will have one or two newer HTPC:s with Intel CPU and Intels Graphics to support....

    THANKS!!!

    Quote from chewitt

    It's nVidia's responsibility to support Linux standards; not our responsibility to re-engineer our entire distro to support nVidia.

    Probably right but still a problem for the Nvidia user base, even if it's small. But what about AMD? I've read UVD relies on VDPAU too? Maybe it's outdated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/unified_video_decoder#linux https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/hardware/vaapi but will AMD fully support VAAPI then?

    • Official Post

    AMD dropped VDPAU (because it doesn't support 10-bit or HEVC and nVidia no longer maintains it) and switched to VAAPI which already has DRM/KMS and GBM support from work done by Intel for their own GPUs (which means VAAPI is no longer a proprietary single-vendor thing so it's saved from execution in k19). I'm not aware of all the details but it would be reasonable to assume the newer driver supports the majority (but probably not 100%) of the current devices.

    NB: It should still be possible for nVidia users to switch to another distro that supports X11 or Wayland which can hook into NVDEC support in FFMpeg. It just won't be possible to continue with 'official' LE once we remove X11 as the DRM/KMS architecture needs GBM (which nVidia does not support) or someone has to go implement EGL Streams; which is entirely possible but unlikely to come from current LE/Kodi developers who are rather fed-up with proprietary nVidia stuff. If someone wants to implement it, they need to have a thick skin to deal with comments on the submission and they need to be committed to long-term supporting the code. If there's a hint of expecting Kodi developers to maintain it there will be impolite responses from Kodi's lead architects :)

    Quote from hundrakg
    • Intel (i915) using VAAPI on Linux 4.18+

    what is intel i915? what cpu:s from intel will support the new LE10(kodi 19)?

    i915 is just the name of the Intel IGP driver which is integrated into the Linux kernel.

    Since Intel offers more or less reliable open source driver support and their IGPs support basically all media formats you can choose whatever you like as long as the Linux kernel features this CPU too.

    Also check out this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/intel_quick_sync_video#hardware_decoding_and_encoding

    Anyway ask again next year or whenever you're going to upgrade because the future is unclear and AMD is a strong competitor (again)