[winswitch] NVENC developer key?

[Antoine Martin]

Good news everyone,

It seems that the beta drivers 346.16 do not require *any* license keys
at all to run (at least on the "GTX 750Ti"s I have tested on).
So, anyone with a sufficiently recent Nvidia card can now enjoy hardware
accelerated encoding, giving you very low latency + high framerate.
The not so good news: I have found a serious bug in xpra with NVENC, and
so you should really avoid using this module with Xpra 0.14 unless you
*never* resize any of your windows... It is also quite difficult to
deploy in 0.14 as you need to full CUDA SDK at runtime.
I strongly recommend using the upcoming 0.15 release instead which has
much improved NVENC support, including SDKv4 support.

Cheers
Antoine



On 15/06/14 21:55, Antoine Martin wrote:
>> Quick update on this: NVidia's contempt for Linux users continues unabated.
>> The latest Linux drivers still require a license key to function with
>> consumer cards, not only that but they have also changed those keys
>> during the stable updates to their drivers: the latest 331 and 334
>> drivers now require different keys than they did before.
>> With the 337 branch it is even worse: the newer keys are accepted, but
>> the API has changed and so the codec needs to be rebuilt against the
>> newer API headers, which have not been released yet.. So this one is a
>> complete no go at present.
>> It also means that the nvenc codec in xpra is actually tied to specific
>> versions of the drivers, which is another system maintenance headache.
> Slight correction:
> * it is the 340 branch that breaks the API and looks like it will need a
> new SDK
> * the 337 branch does run, but breaks the YUV444 mode, so we now disable
> support for it when this driver version is detected.
> I have summarized this nvidia driver mess here:
> http://xpra.org/trac/ticket/595#comment:1
>
> Antoine
>>
>> Start of rant:
>> "Proprietary Tyrants"
>> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/proprietary-tyrants.html
>> " A/tyrant/device is one that refuses to allow users to install a
>> different operating system or a modified operating system. These devices
>> have measures to block execution of anything other than the “approved”
>> system versions. We also refer to this practice as/tivoization/."
>>
>> "Proprietary Sabotage"
>> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/proprietary-sabotage.html
>>
>> "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master--and if you use the program,
>> he is your master." - RMS
>> End of rant.
>>
>> Cheers
>> Antoine