[Arm-netbook] Any ARM SoC has Open-Source access to hardware video decoder ?

[Gordan Bobic]

On 06/26/2012 03:29 AM, lkcl luke wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 2:34 AM, Tom Cubie<mr.hipboi at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 2:32 AM, lkcl luke<luke.leighton at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 6:27 PM, Alexey Eromenko<al4321 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>> Hi All !
>>>>
>>>> I have read from other thread, that Freescale iMX 6 provides better
>>>> access to docs than Allwinner does.
>>>
>>>   yes - but so what?  you're not comparing like with like.  imx6 has
>>> great docs, but no silicon yet.  allwinner has an A10 CPU (Cortex A8)
>>> that has been shipping in huuuuge volume for over a year.  freescale
>>> are a U.S.-based corporation that anyone could sue the pants off and
>>> impound all product _and_ get them in court; allwinner are a PRC-based
>>> company where compliance with copyright, trademarks and patents are
>>> pretty meaningless (*1).
>>
>> Sigh, this becomes an advantage.
>
>   yes.  unfortunately :)  it saves both time and money on the part of
> the SoC vendor.  i'm still trying to get my head round a strategy to
> leverage proper (and ultimately full) GPL compliance out of PRC SoC
> vendors.

Yeah, it's a tricky one, especially since people will buy any crap as 
long as it's cheap, so boycot isn't an option that is likely to be 
effective until everybody suddenly wisens up (yeah, right).

As I said before, price of the SoC is only a tiny and usually 
insignificant part of the product. By the time you have paid somebody to 
write the required libraries and drivers for it from specs that are 
usually either unavailable or are of questionable quality it would have 
been much cheaper to shell out an extra few $/unit and get a Marvell or 
TI SoC. Not to mention that by the time you have done that you'll have a 
product that nobody wants any more because it is 2 generations out of 
date. You get what you pay for.

Gordan