I read this on Phoronix : [Phoronix] AMD Opens Up XvBA! Their Catalyst Linux Video API](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTEzNg)
where purportedly AMD has finally opened up the X-Video Bitstream Acceleration interface (they have released an XvBA SDK (with a header file), sample code, and a sample library).
… this has LONG been waited for, as noted in the Phoronix article:
… in 2008 we were the first to thoroughly talk about AMD’s X-Video Bitstream Acceleration (XvBA) API found in their Catalyst Linux driver to expose their UVD2 video engine now under non-Windows operating systems. However, when the XvBA library was made available, it was next to useless since they hadn’t published the documentation or any header files describing this video playback acceleration interface. A year later, in November of 2009, AMD and Splitted Desktop Systems released a VA-API front-end to XvBA so that VA-API multi-media applications could seamlessly use XvBA with the Catalyst driver.
However, in the year and couple months since the VA-API to XvBA library around, this AMD Linux video acceleration API hasn’t been too favorable. It’s often buggy in particular driver releases and is just not as good as NVIDIA’s Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU), which pre-dates AMD’s Linux video work. However, we have heard that AMD is working on a new video driver implementation whereby VA-API would be exposed directly.
Coming as a shock right now though is that AMD has finally opened up the X-Video Bitstream Acceleration interface. They have released an XvBA SDK (with a header file), sample code, and a sample library.
Unfortunately, the article goes on to note that this won’t do much good for those hoping to see AMD’s UVD2 engine supported by the open-source Radeon graphics drivers. Video decoding/encoding still is not supported there since AMD cannot publicly document their video engine at this time without potentially compromising the Digital Rights Management (DRM) for other platforms.
Whether this will improve the functionality of users with ATI graphic hardware (running Linux) is not clear to me, as the article suggests the VA-API wrapper library may be more of use.