iDCT in SDL for ATI cards

SDL Development
1

Hi there,

I’m wondering if any of you guys know about dvd support in sdl for the
ATI rage or ATI radeon video cards. This cards have hardware support for
mpg2 decoding in the form of hardware iDCT and motion compensation, and
I read some time ago that loki was working on adding this support as
part of sdl, but I can’t find any docs about it other than PR stuff from
ATI and old generic statements in Loki websites. I’m interested in
hardware assisted iDCT for my own project, and I would much rather do it
in Linux, even if it means that I have to use a binary library, but
can’t find it anywhere.

Thanks

2

Hi there,

I’m wondering if any of you guys know about dvd support in sdl for the
ATI rage or ATI radeon video cards. This cards have hardware support for
mpg2 decoding in the form of hardware iDCT and motion compensation, and
I read some time ago that loki was working on adding this support as
part of sdl, but I can’t find any docs about it other than PR stuff from
ATI and old generic statements in Loki websites.

I worked on integrating ATI’s hardware accelerated MPEG decoding into SMPEG,
and it turned out that the API that they provided at the time used lots of
register pokes to get the data to the hardware and the call overhead
brought the speed down to about equal to a P2 300 rendering in software.
I spoke to them about it, and they said they were working on a new version
to address the speed issues, and I haven’t heard from them since. That
was almost two years ago.

So, as far as I know there isn’t any usable code for ATI MPEG decoding,
although I suspect they’ve perfected it and are just talking to other
folks besides Loki about it. :slight_smile:

See ya!
-Sam Lantinga, Software Engineer, Blizzard Entertainment