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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Was this the result of much reverse-engineering, or was there a recent Broadcom release/leak of the needed information? The files in https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware/tree/master/... are interesting... I'd suggest making a copy of them for safekeeping. ;-)

I looked a little more in detail, and this might make it easy to enable/unlock the hardware codecs that were initially locked-down.

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It wasn't a leak, Broadcom publicly released all this code a while ago to aid the making of an open source GPU driver. All this has been licensed under 3-Clause BSD license and distributed by Broadcom themselves. There's no point in making a copy since you can just download these files from Broadcom themselves.

This won't help you with codecs, codecs are mostly code in the firmware that uses vector instructions of the VPU to accelerate the video decoding. If you want to use the codecs I would recommend paying for them instead of engaging in piracy.

The "BROADCOM CONFIDENTIAL" header in a few of them certainly made me think otherwise...

codecs are mostly code in the firmware that uses vector instructions of the VPU to accelerate the video decoding

That means it should be possible for open-source firmware to add more, freely usable, codecs than in the proprietary firmware.

Yes if you can implement high performance video codecs using pretty much undocumented vector instructions of the VPU, you are welcome to do so.

Also, there are hardware blocks for JPEG and MPEG for best performance. See vcodec.h etc.

But the VPU 2D SIMD is good for non supported codecs.

> If you want to use the codecs I would recommend paying for them instead of engaging in piracy.

Who says this is a contradiction?

Those headers are as I recall all part of Broadcom's release at https://www.broadcom.com/support/videocore.

The rest is a matter of looking at register traces and lot's of hard work on Kristina's part.

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