In a few days this will get started. We will use the EFIKA Project pages as a guide to identifiy those to be involved. Write us if you would like to participate. We will include ODW/PegasosPPC users/developers also. We will provide the graphic cards and the 2D/3D sources. We may have to ramp up to the 3D source release. We will know more later this week.

Happy New Year!

R&B 8)

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Which cards are we talking about? Are they possible
to purchase at a good price or are they rare? Will
you sell them in your store?

I think the two best choices would be Volari V8 or
Volari V5. They both have MPEG-2 hardware
decoders builtin, among many other features.

As you can read here the video problem I found
was with SVCD/MPEG-2. XviD worked fine.

A fully working hardware decoder would help
all the mediaplayer projects.

100% working 3D drivers is what the Linux/PPC
community desperately needs.

hence my (long time)idea to use an FPGA on every future consumer efika and other HW to assist AVC/h.264 En/De-coding.

Mpeg4-AVC(part10) is what will single out interesting/desirable boards today/year, not some old Mpeg4-ASP(divx/xvid,part2).

personally id like to see something like KiloCORE on there,seeing as they are power members too, and we all need to work together to prosper in this new year.

ill ask the question that seems reasonable though.

if there existed a consumer board that had this kiloCORE or other FPGA onboard as standard (and some sample code to show how to use it for AVC decoding etc) would you or your customers pay the extra cost of this chip so as to get the mass production costs down.., and indeed what cost would/could that be.

if your not interested in encoding/decoding then you can always re-program the chip for other apps depending on your needs at the time OC.

if you have a special order that doesnt need these chips or other options, then it seems a lot easyer to just not put these things on your special order at the factory than have it the other way round... special board made to plug it all into etc.

btw ,what bitrate are we talking for your '480x576 MPEG2 video from my Pegserve' and the Xvid file, it matters.

for instance for x86 xp, an original DVB mpeg2.ts file (1.2gig file @3000+ kbits/s)encoded to AVC/x264 useing MEncoder264 MEncoder264
http://mulder.dummwiedeutsch.de/home...ml#mencoder264
at PAL 640 x 352@900kbit/s brings it down to something like 290meg, if you want to go mad, but still get better quality than the old ASP divx/xvid encoding, then you can reduce it to below 500kbit/s and it will still look good at full screen res (you can get it down as low as 100meg with practice and smaller screen/bitrates with AVC/x264).

even a 290kbit/s AVC encode works great for web streaming with VLC.

on a side note, i still think its a better idea to put all the external ports on standard pin headers and supply industry wide ribbon connectors to route your needs to any place you like as a box maker rather than fixed/soldered to the board.

sure you can de-solder them an fit your own but its a pain for more than a few boards.

Absolutely right! Unfortunately PPC linux has been kind of ignored by the greater community.
Although a good idea for the future of developer boards, it would not particularly be high up on the list for the commercial boards.

Though the board's connection density will be dramatically increased, but impractical for developers without the extra tools to crimp and solder connectors up. Perhaps a better alternative would be to have a mass connector on one edge and supply a standard breakout board much like how on x86 motherboards how the ac97 interface is brought onto a plug and the board has the audio codec on it.

Ideally for the XGI board it could be slightly shorter lengthwise because on the standard AGP boards they are slightly too long (/the connectors on the board are obscured.)

We're focussing on the V3XT/V3XE since they are low power and fairly high performance (at or above Radeon 9200) with the same MPEG-2 decoder and deinterlacer etc. and full component video output (i.e. HDTV!) bundled with it. We may sell them on the store at reasonable prices soon. The first goal is to send out the ones to approved and where they will be beneficial to developers.

The V5 and V8 are full profile AGP cards so they will not fit on an Efika without a slot that does not exist. We may however think about Pegasos users, and look to PCI Express for the discussions on the 8641D.

We have drivers with kernel framebuffer, X.org 2D, DRM/DRI 3D, and XvMC support. There will be source code. Not all of the source is open yet, but we're working on that. At least we want to get as much documentation for you guys as possible and enough quality source code to start from so that the XGI chipsets can be used how they need to be used :)

_________________
Matt Sealey

If you order 500+ we might make them to that spec for you.

In the meantime most people like not having to buy a set of $5 cable packs for their board before they can use it. The cost to put the connectors on the board is less than a dollar, and with pin headers.. well, about the same, so you win out on price and functionality the way we do this now.

One thing we discussed already is to fully expose PSC6 (IrDA/SPI/I2S) rather than just the IrDA port, and maybe allow the serial port as a ribbon cable (with a view to getting rid of it.. it's also a useful GPIO header with the right configuration) but the rest will have to stay I think, otherwise the board is "useless as shipped" which is not how we want to present ourselves to customers.

_________________
Matt Sealey

Neko:
Sounds good. The V3XE is for FPGA so I guess you
are still working on the EFIKA-FPGA?

"for FPGA"?

http://www.xgitech.com/products/product ... E46925BD4E}

In all reality the V3XE is simply the lead-free, embedded oriented name for the V3XT - it's the same chip deep down and in the face of drivers.

We will ship V3XT cards, and sell these, and if we need a discrete chip, it will be a V3XE on some board. No major decisions have been made on this though, we are more concerned about seeding and driver support than rushing to design a board around a chip. The groundwork is being laid, however, with this developer program and all our past work with XGI and their driver support and documentation.

_________________
Matt Sealey

:/

Not exactly encouraging words from Phoronix
and the comments on OSNews.

I would guess negotiations are going alot
better between Genesi and XGi than the
NDA's SkyOS would have to sign..

Between XGI and Genesi things have gone and will go well. Perhaps, if SkyOS can be ported to the EFIKA things can get back on track with that effort too.

R&B 8)

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Well it looks like that article was a week too soon! :)
Well, we are focussing on Power Architecture but the drivers will compile fine for x86 (care has been taken to keep it this way).

We hope to have more than just source code for developers to work on but this takes a little time to organise, most technology of this kind (especially as XGI has some best-in-class video decoders and so on) is fairly secretive.

However with full source code, and some relevant documentation, we're working towards it. XGI have released their source, and we're going to work with developers to concentrate on keeping it Power friendly, improvements like AltiVec where possible and relevant, and of course much more than Linux kernel and X.org stuff.

_________________
Matt Sealey

A question on the opengl tech aspects of the XGI V3XT:
Does it support both vertex and fragment shaders?

On http://www.delphi3d.net/hardware/index.php are XGI cards listed but it is unsure for what card the specs are.

Are you still considering projects to seed with the cards? The V3XT/V3XE sounds like it provides exactly the features that I am looking for for my project. If not, are you going to be selling them?

Yes.

But, first we need to finish the new site. We hope to have it online soon!

R&B :)

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

I wonder if XGI can survive with that RealVision Inc deal alone. Communication and marketing is still very poor and hasn't improved after all the mistakes that have been made. :roll:

On their job list, they still list careers dating back to 2005.

Reminds me of "Amiga Development India". :lol: