[mckirk]

It'd be really cool if we had 'upgradable codec FPGAs' in our machines that you could just use flash to the newest codec... but that'd probably be noticeably more expensive, and also not really in the interest of the manufacturers, who want to have reasons to sell new chips.

[daeken]

Back in ~2004, I worked on a project to define a codec virtual machine, with the goal of each file being able to reference the standard it was encoded against, along with a link to a reference decoder built for that VM. My thought was that you could compile that codec for the system you were running on and decode in software, or if a sufficient DSP or FPGA was available, target that.

While it worked, I don't think it ever left my machine. Never moved past software decoding -- I was a broke teen with no access to non-standard hardware. But the idea has stuck with me and feels more relevant than ever, with the proliferation of codecs we're seeing now.

It has the Sufficiently Smart Compiler problem baked in, but I tried to define things to be SIMD-native from the start (which could be split however it needed to be for the hardware) and I suspect it could work. Somehow.

[axiolite]

> FPGAs' in our machines that you could just use flash to the newest codec

They're called GPUs... They're ASICs rather than FPGAs, but it's easy to update the driver software to handle new video codecs. The difficulty is motivating GPU manufacturers to do so... They'd rather sell you a new one with newer codec support as a feature.

[toast0]

A lot of the GPUs have fixed function hardware to accelerate parts of encode/decode. If the new codec is compatible, sure.

But often a new codec requires decoders to know how to work with new things that the fixed function hardware likely can't do.

Encoding might actually be different. If your encoder hardware can only do fixed block sizes, and can only detect some types of motion, a driver change might be able to package it up as the new codec. Probably not a lot of benefit, other than ticking a box... but might be useful sometimes. Especially if you say offload motion detection, but the new codec needs different arithmetic encoding, you'd need to use cpu (or general purpose gpu) to do the arithmetic encoding and presumably get a size saving over the old codec.

[lxgr]

They’re programmable parallel compute units, and as such pretty much the conceptual opposite of ASICs.

The main point of having ASICs for video codecs these days is efficiency, not being able to real-time decode a stream at all (as even many embedded CPUs can do that at this point).

[astrange]

GPU video decoding doesn't use the graphics cores. It just happens to be on the GPU and is not upgradeable.