[mythtv-users] No ATI support for Myth says AMD

[Todd Ignasiak]

> I agree with you on all points. Rather than complain about what we
> don't have we should be happy with what we do have: a binary driver
> that works pretty well for most people under most circumstances. The
> fact that it is not "open" is a philosophical problem, not a
> technical one.

Well, not entirely.    It also has technical implications.   There are
plenty of difficulties around XvMC that would be a whole lot easier to
debug and solve if the driver source code was available.   Using all
the capabilities of the hardware would also be feasible if the code &
specs were open (e.g. the new chips can accelerate H.264, but the
drivers don't expose that).    The 64 bit nvidia drivers had an known
XvMC initialization problem for a LONG time, which made using XvMC
difficult at best.  That would have been solvable with open drivers,
but with binary blob you're at the mercy of nvidia to fix it (which
apparently they did, maybe two years later).