Vidix - History

History

Nick Kurshev, the author of VIDIX, writes that his motivation in creating the interface was to resolve the issue reported by Vladimir Dergachev in his RFC for an alternative kernel multimedia API:

v4l, v4l2 and Xv are all suffering from the same problem: attempt to fit existing multimedia devices into a fixed scheme. —Vladimir Dergachev, video4linux mailing list

Dergachev noted that existing multimedia interfaces were hard-coded for each device, and suggested that driver developers would have more flexibility with a layer of abstraction.

VIDIX was born as an alternative to the Linux kernel-based drivers from the MPlayer project. For a long time, VIDIX lived within the MPlayer project; later, it lived within the MPlayerXP project, a fork of MPlayer by Kurshev. During that time, Linux and many other Unix-like operating systems lacked quality drivers for the video subsystems. Almost all of the technical documentation for video hardware was under non-disclosure agreements at the time, and many programmers had to code their drivers blindly. Other developers became interested in using VIDIX for their own players, and they asked Kurshev to separate it from the MPlayer project.

VIDIX became an alternative set of device drivers, based on the idea of direct hardware access (similar to Microsoft's DirectX). These drivers mapped accelerated video memory to avoid colour-space conversion and software scaling from the side of the players.

The X Window System now includes the Direct Rendering Infrastructure, which provides similar functionality with broad hardware support. Kurshev continued to develop VIDIX through 2007, when version 1.0.0 of the software was released.