Rudolf Cornelissen's work with the VIA driver development is currently on hold as he deals with family matters, and other development projects such as a new video consumer node that is capable of displaying video on non-primary graphics cards.

The new side project is already in a third alpha release and is based on Kevin Patterson's MK mediaplayer, with which the node will be bundled with shortly. You may remember Kevin Patterson for his work on BeTVOut, among other things.

The video consumer node displays video in VGA mode at 640x480 resolution, and supports overlay and workspace scaled blit drawing modes. Currently only video up to 640x480 can be played back but later Rudolf expects to extend it by supporting up to DVD-like resolution (1024x768).

In terms of the nVidia driver it now has support for the SCALED_FILTERED_BLIT function (the Be defined version), which means the node can also playback video on NV40+ cards that we don't have overlay support for. To be clear, if you use at least two cards of which the NV40+ is coldstarted by the system BIOS, you can display video using hardware acceleration even if it doesn't have overlay support.

Rudolf also received a brand new Matrox G550 PCIe in the mail recently. This is said to be the first PCIe x1 card worldwide, and of course, it should work with the Haiku driver, as that already supports the 'old' G550. This card can (if all is right) be coldstarted by the Haiku driver, so Rudolf will try the video consumer node on the PCIe x16 NV43 he has spare as a good test.

For the immediate future Rudolf plans to release his new video consumer node and his updates to both the Matrox and nVidia driver, onto BeBits, along with the slightly modified version of Kevin Patterson's MK mediaplayer.

In Rudolf's own words, his long-term plans:



That about wraps up what is new in the world of Rudolf. Make sure you head over to BeBits to test those new drivers when they come out.