X-Video Bitstream Acceleration (XvBA), designed by AMD Graphics for its Radeon

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

and

APU APU or Apu may refer to: Film and television * ''The Apu Trilogy'', a series of three Bengali films, directed by Satyajit Ray, with the fictional character Apu Roy, comprising: ** ''Pather Panchali'' (''Song of the Little Road'') (1955), the first ...

, is an arbitrary extension of the X video extension (Xv) for the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

operating-systems. XvBA

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

allows video programs to offload portions of the

video decoding A video decoder is an electronic circuit, often contained within a single integrated circuit chip, that converts base-band analog video signals to digital video. Video decoders commonly allow programmable control over video characteristics such ...

process to the

video-hardware. Currently, the portions designed to be offloaded by XvBA onto the GPU are currently

motion compensation Motion compensation in computing, is an algorithmic technique used to predict a frame in a video, given the previous and/or future frames by accounting for motion of the camera and/or objects in the video. It is employed in the encoding of video d ...

(MC) and inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT), and variable-length decoding (VLD) for MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP (MPEG-4 Part 2, including Xvid, and older DivX and Nero Digital), MPEG-4 AVC (H.264),

WMV3 Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: The original video compression technology ...

, and

VC-1 SMPTE 421, informally known as VC-1, is a video coding format. Most of it was initially developed as Microsoft's proprietary video format Windows Media Video 9 in 2003. With some enhancements including the development of a new Advanced Profile, ...

encoded video. XvBA is a direct competitor to

NVIDIA Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

's Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) and

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

's Video Acceleration API (VA API). In November 2009 an XvBA backend for Video Acceleration API (VA API) was released, which means any software that supports VA API will also support XvBA. On 24 February 2011, an official XvBA SDK (Software Development Kit) was publicly released alongside a suite of open source tools by AMD.

Device drivers

Each hardware video

capable of XvBA video acceleration requires a

X11 The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

software device driver to enable these features. Currently only AMD's ATI Radeon graphics cards hardware that have support for Unified Video Decoder version 2.0 or later (primarily the Radeon HD 4000 series or later) are supported by the proprietary

ATI Catalyst AMD Radeon Software is a device driver and utility software package for AMD's List of AMD graphics processing units, graphics cards and List of AMD accelerated processing units, APUs. Its graphical user interface is built with Electron (softwar ...

device driver.

Software supporting XvBA natively

XBMC Media Center Kodi (formerly XBMC) is a free and open-source media player software application developed by the XBMC Foundation, a non-profit technology consortium. Kodi is available for multiple operating systems and hardware platforms, with a software 1 ...

* OpenELEC *

MPlayer MPlayer is a free and open-source media player software application. It is available for Linux, OS X and Microsoft Windows. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS Research Operating System are also available. A port for DOS using ...

can be compiled to support XvBA

References

External links

AMD's open source page, containing a link to their XvBA SDK and Tools

XvBA Tools open source library, tools, and example code for accessing XvBA
{{XWinSys Application programming interfaces Video acceleration APIs available on Linux Video acceleration X Window extensions Application layer protocols

Device drivers

Software supporting XvBA natively

See also

References

External links