Advice: Drivers for AMD780G with HD3200 + Intrepid + MythTV

[ozra]

Good day all,

I think I need some advice please:

I have read this Forum from side to side and searched extensively and I am still confused. I cannot seem to get a clearcut black/white view on how to proceed and with which driver.

My question is:

I have a Gigabyte Socket AM2+, GA-MA78GPM-DS2H, AMD780G with HD3200 IGP + 128Mb Sideport memory. 4 GB RAM, 2 x 750GB SATA HD and either an AMD 8450 x3 2.1GHz Phenom or an AMD ATHLON 64 X2 6000+ AM2 (3GHz) CPU

I would like to run Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 + MythTV 0.21 + Fixes (Frontend) (No Compiz, No games etc - Only purpose is as Music/DVD/TV player/PVR)

My Needs are:
HDMI Video out (no audio needed - will be via SPDIF) to display on 1280 x 1080i 50" Pioneer Plasma Display. (True Res 1368 x 768 so need to be able to adjust overscan a bit - not much though)

SMOOTH DVD Playback.

CONSISTENT and SMOOTH and Tear free TV Playback (if possible using Greedymotion x 2 Filter - Best for smoothing tickertapes)

Mainly, glitch free operation on the video side.

Now to my question:

Which driver do I use to achieve the above?

If I cannot achieve the above needs with the built-in HD3200 please advise me of a cheap (passive cooled) ATI add-in card and driver that I can use to achieve the above needs.

Unfortunately, the more I read, the more confused I get, thus the question.

Thank You Kindly

Background info:

I also have Gigabyte Socket AM2+, GA-M78SM-S2H, GF8200 but have given up on it. Not only has the HDMI output stopped working on any NVIDIA driver after 173 and up to 180.22 but if I use the NVIDIA driver 173 to 180.22 I get the following continuous SATA errors on my Hard drives when using Bonnie to exercise them:

[ 247.123447] ata2.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x201 SErr 0x400000 action 0x6 frozen
[ 247.123452] ata2.00: irq_stat 0x08000000, interface fatal error
[ 247.123455] ata2: SError: { Handshk }
[ 247.123459] ata2.00: cmd 61/00:00:cf:ff:2e/04:00:05:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 524288 out
[ 247.123460] res 40/00:04:cf:ff:2e/00:00:05:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
[ 247.123462] ata2.00: status: { DRDY }
[ 247.123466] ata2.00: cmd 61/40:48:e7:05:2f/02:00:05:00:00/40 tag 9 ncq 294912 out
[ 247.123467] res 40/00:04:cf:ff:2e/00:00:05:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)

The above errors go away if using the Intrepid Vesa driver or by disabling the onboard 8200 IGP and installing an add-in 7200 or 7300 Nvidia card.
The combination of NVIDIA drivers + 8200 IGP causes the errors to re-appear every time.

Even with NCQ and and the Write-Cache turned off!

Unfortunately I have NEVER been able to get Tear free and Smooth TV/DVD playback using the NVIDIA board. Plus the HDMI output not working once the NVIDIA driver loads (above v173 - Works fine for Text output via HDMI in all versions until driver loads) means I just had enough.

Last nail in the coffin was the SATA errors for this MB.

Note that HDMI output works on the 7200 and 7300 add-in cards with all drivers but Tear free smooth TV/DVD playback still eludes me after having read the nvnews site from side to side and applying various suggested fixes, vblanks, glyphcaches etc.

[bridgman]

The problem is that you are asking a question whose answer is changing rapidly ;)

Today your best bet is probably to use the "restricted driver" included with 8.10 (which is a recent version of fglrx), playback through the opengl output, and turn on sync to vblank in the control panel. On the other hand, we have released enough code and register header info for the open source drivers to start making rapid progress with your GPU. I don't think either driver is perfect for what you want today, but both are progressing fairly quickly.

Sorry that is a crappy useless answer but we're kind of at an inflection point here -- until a few weeks ago fglrx was pretty much your only option, but now the open drivers are moving ahead quickly too.

[ozra]

Sorry that is a crappy useless answer but we're kind of at an inflection point here -- until a few weeks ago fglrx was pretty much your only option, but now the open drivers are moving ahead quickly too.


Thank You for your reply. Much appreciated :) It gives me things/directions to try.

I think most of my frustration at the moment comes from my past experience with the NVIDIA MB. It has been 4 months struggling/waiting/struggling etc so I am a bit over it :)

[gsacks]

Ozra, I (like many others) have a Gigabyte 780g board. Mine is the GA-MA78GM-S2H. It is essentially the same as your board without the sideband memory. I use the fglrx release from last August (8.8). I've not bothered to upgrade the driver since I got it working. But I am also running Ubuntu 8.04 (again, I'm not upgrading until there is a compelling reason). Outputting HDMI to a 720 Panasonic Plasma, which similar to your TV, has a native resolution that is not quite real 720P. But the thing you need to realize about your Plasma is that it will scale 720P or 1080P resolution over HDMI to its own native resolution for you. So just set your driver to use whichever of those two works best for you, unless the driver will support the exact res of your TV. SPDIF out works fine in 8.04, but it is not on by default. You need to enable it manually. But since 8.10 has gone to Pulse Audio by default, you might have problems. Pulse Audio is not fully cooked. You should also read the thread "black border" in this forum. There is info there about fixing over/underscan problems. They may have fixed it by now, but the fglrx that I use has underscan on by default for HDMI out, and it was kind of a pain to get the edges of the screen properly aligned. I also have MythTV installed but I don't use it much. There is a very annoying problem with my HDHomerun tuner that if you change a channel in LiveTV, either MythTV or the fglrx driver does not figure it out if the channel resolution has changed and the screen goes all yucky. Technical term there :) I've read that there is no problem with recordings, but I haven't verified that myself. So now I use XBMC to watch the HDHomerun.

[ozra]

Outputting HDMI to a 720 Panasonic Plasma, which similar to your TV, has a native resolution that is not quite real 720P. But the thing you need to realize about your Plasma is that it will scale 720P or 1080P resolution over HDMI to its own native resolution for you. So just set your driver to use whichever of those two works best for you, unless the driver will support the exact res of your TV. SPDIF out works fine in 8.04, but it is not on by default. You need to enable it manually.

Thank you for the reply. I know about the upscaling yeah. I guess I meant to say that I can either adjust the overscan or much simpler, adjust the size of MythTV. Don't have much of a problem with the overscan when watching TV or DVD's in Myth, it is more of a problem when viewing the Myth Menus. About 10 pixels are lost on each border. Again, not much but it looks bad :)

I like XBMC. Looks very good. Unfortunately it crashes on Intrepid. Every now and then directly on startup. Other times when it has been running for a random number of hours. Guess I will have to compile the SVN and see if that works.

The only reason I am using Intrepid is that on the NVIDIA board I had stuttering sound on SPDIF (ALC888) when using Hardy. No amount of tweaking of ALSA/Realtek drivers etc could solve the problem. The Intrepid and subsequent kernels fixed that. (Saw the suggested patch somewhere for Intel HDA sound or something like that) So I am even open to going back to Hardy.


Thanks again for the advice re the drivers.

I will try it:)

Just have to wait for the neighbours to be out when I do, so that they do not get alarmed by all the wailing and self flagellation if it does not work:o

[NefariousAryq]

Every time I see a thread like this, my heart skips a beat... thinking MAYBE this will be the thread to give the definitive advice to get my ATi stuff working with Myth properly. Heh.

Ozra, were you able to make any progress? If I can just get rid of the tearing, everything will be perfect. :)

--Eric

[gsmd]

NefariousAryq
Having no tearing in XBMC (at least). The trick was to launch amdcc and move the "sync" (smth like that) slider to the right-most position.

[ozra]

Every time I see a thread like this, my heart skips a beat... thinking MAYBE this will be the thread to give the definitive advice to get my ATi stuff working with Myth properly. Heh.

Ozra, were you able to make any progress? If I can just get rid of the tearing, everything will be perfect. :)

--Eric

Hiya,

Unfortunately my progress is rather slow. Whilst it all worked great initially I am facing some problems:

1. Using Kano's script or manual install the install for 8.12 went well.

I rebooted fine. Checked I was using fglrx etc. ALL Good! Swopped over to HDMI output (from DVI) and rebooted. Had the HDTV underscan problem. Tried:

aticonfig --set-dispattrib=tmds2i,positionX:0
aticonfig --set-dispattrib=tmds2i,positionY:0
aticonfig --set-dispattrib=tmds2i,sizeX:1920
aticonfig --set-dispattrib=tmds2i,sizeY:1080

Stated that I had to run aticonfig --initial
Did sudo aticonfig --initial and then tried the above. PRESTO! No more underscan on HDMI.

Rebooted.

New Problem: So called "Black screen on reboot" (actually flashing monitor but no picture - monitor is not changing refresh or resolution - just flashes grey then flashes black - Monitor status indicates 1080 @ 60Hz constant) Tried briefly to switch to Alt F1 console but unsuccessful.

Now trying to get more error messages out of Xorg logging but unsure on how to set verbosity before GDM starts but stumped.

Seems like my paperbag is made from re-inforced something or other.

[ozra]

OK.... My findings after playing around with ATI / fglrx (8.12) and Radeon:

Using HDMI output to a DELL 24" 1920 x 1080 @ 60Hz monitor:

fglrx: Installed OK. Black underscan border issue. Fix border issue as in previous posts but on reboot, no display picture. Overwrite amd database to get picture back which leaves us with an underscan border. Repeat ad finitum.

ati: Installed OK. No underscan border. Using MythTV SD playback and HD playback is a slow slideshow with lots of combing.

radeon: Same as ati driver.

Which leaves me with........ an unusable system.

The less I say about my feelings with regards to AMD and NVIDIA at this stage the better.

:mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:

Regards :mad:

[bridgman]

When you say "radeon" do you mean "radeonhd" ? The "ati" and "radeon" drivers are the same code; ati is just a wrapper around (radeon, r128, mach64).

If you were running radeonhd, the 6xx-7xx-support branches of radeonhd and drm will give you Xv acceleration albeit with some EXA corruption issues that agd5f is working through. If you are not running the 6xx-7xx branches of those two components then playback will definitely be slow because you won't have Xv acceleration.

[ozra]

When you say "radeon" do you mean "radeonhd" ? The "ati" and "radeon" drivers are the same code; ati is just a wrapper around (radeon, r128, mach64).

If you were running radeonhd, the 6xx-7xx-support branches of radeonhd and drm will give you Xv acceleration albeit with some EXA corruption issues that agd5f is working through. If you are not running the 6xx-7xx branches of those two components then playback will definitely be slow because you won't have Xv acceleration.

Hey Bridgman,

Thanks for your reply.

You may need a macchiato in your hand if you are going to read this:

When I said radeon I meant radeon - not radeonhd. I read that it is the same driver but tried it anyway. When I tried (and I desperately want to try radeonhd) I went the easy way: sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd and then added the radeonhd driver to xorg.conf

Reboot and GDM did not start.

Is there any one or two places where I can find the EXACT and EXPLICIT steps I need to follow for HOWTO install the latest radeonhd driver.

I only seem to find guidelines or outdated (pre-Intrepid) documentation etc that mention "Oh you may need this" (eg:DRI) but never mentions how I go about installing the eg: DRI DRM etc.

I found a guide on here but it states:

WARNING: the following guide is no longer actively supported. Please upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 if you need updated radeon drivers.

As I am on Intrepid already I get confused (not hard for me:) )

My question would be:

For Intrepid: Where can I find exact and explicit documentation to install radeonhd on a fresh intrepid installation? All the steps etc and needed parts DRI DRM MESA etc.

Where can I find the latest list of correct things for the HD3200 that I should add to xorg.conf (as the drivers evolve these things change) for the radeonhd driver.

My apologies if the above sounds like I need to be spoonfed. I tend to take things very literal when I am not au fait with something and tend to ignore nothing, which as you can imagine with so much documentation out there and so many moving targets, can cause quite a conundrum at 2am when I am trying to get video to work.

I found this guide: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonHD
Any good?

If I use this: https://launchpad.net/~tormodvolden/+archive/ppa
How do I know which packages I need to install so that the radeonhd driver works as intended.

If all this makes sense after such a long read I bow to you and of course any help appreciated.:)

Regards

[bridgman]

All good questions.

The radeonhd package may have been too old to work with your system, not sure. You would definitely need very recent radeonhd and drm code (today's, actually ;)) to get decent video playback on the 780 so the exact date of the package doesn't matter anyways.

I'm not sure if there are edgers builds available for the 6xx/7xx branches yet -- my guess is that you might have to wait until we merge to master in order to get prebuilt packages.

The radeonhd wiki has pretty good information about building radeonhd from source, but I don't think it talks about branches; will check when I get home and try to post back.

http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonhd

EDIT -- just took a look, focus is more on mesa than drm and not much on branches. You might want to wait until we get this merged to master; agd5f is making good progress picking off the remaining issues so it shouldn't be too long.

[ozra]

All good questions.

The radeonhd package may have been too old to work with your system, not sure. You would definitely need very recent radeonhd and drm code (today's, actually ;)) to get decent video playback on the 780 so the exact date of the package doesn't matter anyways.

I'm not sure if there are edgers builds available for the 6xx/7xx branches yet -- my guess is that you might have to wait until we merge to master in order to get prebuilt packages.

The radeonhd wiki has pretty good information about building radeonhd from source, but I don't think it talks about branches; will check when I get home and try to post back.

http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonhd

EDIT -- just took a look, focus is more on mesa than drm and not much on branches. You might want to wait until we get this merged to master; agd5f is making good progress picking off the remaining issues so it shouldn't be too long.


Thanks Bridgman.

I'll read the wiki anyway for background info but will wait for merging etc before I ask more questions. :)

Have a good day and thanks again.

Regards

[NefariousAryq]

Well, I've given up. My AMD780G/HD3200 hardware is being relegated to a desktop machine. I purchased it over 6 months ago, for my MythTV box -- and 6 months worth of drivers still can't get me "clean" video playback. The MythTV box is now back to being ran off of the older GeForce 6150 integrated graphics motherboard. I'm simply not going to waste any more time on this, as I've wasted too much as it is already. I really wanted to give AMD/ATi the benefit of the doubt... but... eh, whatever.

~~Aryq~~

[mortenbreum]

Hi.
I'm also struggling with a Gigabyte 780G board, and just wanted to put in my 2 cents.
I have smooth tv playback in mythtv, so perhaps this will help you.
What I don't have and would like very much, is audio via HDMI.
I got smooth video playback like this.
* Installed mythbuntu 8.10
* Followed instructions on http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Intrepid_Installation_Guide (catalyst version 9.1)
* In the device section in xorg.conf, add a line
Option "TexturedVideo" "on"

That's it (off the top of my head)

/Morten

[gozer]

I'm running the same mb and gpu (HD 3200). By default, everything works - but I have no hardware video acceleration - the CPU is struggling to keep up when I view HD video (720p usually - haven't tried throwing 1080 at it yet).

So I tried doing the built-in ubuntu method of installing restricted drivers (fglrx). This resulted in the 3cm border around my image, as well as much of the bottom and right of my desktop out of view. I tried running a fix posted by one of the AMD users, but it failed saying I needed to run "aticontrol --initial" first. When I run that, I get the following message:


Found fglrx primary device section
Unable to find any supported Screen sections

This is my xorg.conf file which is generated when the fglrx driver is activated using the 'restricted drivers' control panel:

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
DefaultDepth 24
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "glx"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Default Device"
Driver "fglrx"
EndSection

I'm running video thru the DVI connection, but that just goes to HDMI on the other end. Eventually I'll go HDMI on both ends. Right now I am trying to get VLC to play a video and use the GPU instead of the CPU.

Also, I tried playing a video while running fglrx to see if this was a worthy goal. The video was flickering so bad it was unwatchable. Moving the player window left the video behind and it took a while to catch up. This does not look good. However, I'm wondering if one of these fixes for the border issue will also resolve the flicker?

[bridgman]

If you're running the right bits (radeon or radeonhd from master, drm from 6xx-7xx branch of mesa/drm or from drm-next) you should have good Xv acceleration with the open drivers. The versions of the open drivers that ship with Ubuntu today don't include EXA or Xv acceleration for your GPU.

[sreyan]

If you're running the right bits (radeon or radeonhd from master, drm from 6xx-7xx branch of mesa/drm or from drm-next) you should have good Xv acceleration with the open drivers. The versions of the open drivers that ship with Ubuntu today don't include EXA or Xv acceleration for your GPU.

Hi bridgman, I am messing around with xorg 1.6 with a 780g chipset and while i believe i have the correct drivers installed i have an empty xorg.conf file. Any idea on how i can see which driver i'm using?

xvinfo
X-Video Extension version 2.2
screen #0
no adaptors present


01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon HD 3200 Graphics

[bridgman]

Take a look in your X log file.

[gozer]

I installed radeonhd 1.2.4 which does support my card. However, I see no difference from vesa in performance. There is still no hardware acceleration for my HD 3200.

[bridgman]

The 1.2.4 release supports your GPU for modesetting only.

You need the latest code from git plus a drm driver from the 6xx-7xx branch of drm (or Dave's drm-next tree) in order to get acceleration.

[hieronymous]

I hope it's not inappropriate to revive this ancient thread. It struck a chord with me because the OP had a h/w setup almost identical to mine, and asked very clearly the very same questions I have been struggling to answer via Google for nearly 4 months now. It would seem that if these questions could be answered anywhere, this would be the place, but it's unclear that he ever received satisfaction either, nor can I find anywhere else where these questions are answered unequivocally.

I too have a Gigabyte Socket AM2+, GA-MA78GPM-DS2H, AMD780G with HD3200 IGP + 128Mb Sideport memory, 4 GB RAM but with an AMD 505E CPU(my goal was to minimize power draw, temp. and fan noise and everything I read led me to believe this would be plenty powerful enough for what I wanted to do). I have a single 640GB internal HDD(I also have a 750GB eSATA external that I haven't even gotten around to hooking up yet). I have a couple of tuner cards, one Hauppauge HVR-1600, and one Pinnacle 800i. My interest is in using this as a PVR and DVD player primarily, no interest in gaming. I also want to be able to run play videos through Firefox. I have a 42-inch 1080P television and wish to playback SD and HD smoothly without artifacts at up to 1920x1080 resolution through the HDMI.

I'm running a 9.04 Mythbuntu installation with upgrades to Catalyst 9.8(with trials of virtually every version in between). I ran an early version of the open source ATI drivers briefly but the performance was unbearably slow. Of course I'm not sure I had it configured properly, and for that matter the same goes for the proprietary drivers. I'm pretty much happy with the audio setup after some struggles. I get audio and video through HDMI using mythtv, Firefox, mplayer, and vlc. However, the video performance is unacceptable(lots of jerkiness), very inconsistent, and furthermore very unstable. I've read hundreds(if not thousands) of related posts at this and other sites. I've tried dozens of configuration changes and numerous software versions. What I'm wondering is whether I'm on a wild goose chase. I haven't seen anyone come right out and say so in so many words.

In short, before I start asking more narrow and focused questions and providing more details about my exact current s/w versions and symptoms, etc. I would first like some answers to the following, preferably from someone with direct experience with a somewhat similar configuration (at a minimum the onboard HD3200 GPU which I believe is the biggest issue).

1. Do I have a prayer of accomplishing my goals with my current hardware and the best linux-based distribution software currently available, period? With all the posts I've read on this and other sites, the best answer I can seem to find is a definite maybe, followed by a seemingly endless cycle of "try this, try that", and "wait for the next version of XXX".

2. Being optimistic for the moment that my goals are theoretically possible, am I more likely to get there taking the proprietary or open source route, and in either case which configuration options are the keys to success? I would at least try to limit the universe of options that I experiment with to those that stand a chance of working.

I got involved in this whole endeavor expecting a challenge. In fact that was a big part of the attraction. I thought I might learn a bit in the process. However, here lately I'm beginning to think I should just change my name to Sisyphus.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

[octoberblu3]

I have MythTV running on my HD3200. For the open source drivers, you will need a recent kernel ( >= 2.6.30 ), recent xf86-video-ati ( at least 6.12, I think ), and if running 64 bit Xserver 1.5 or better.

This will get you EXA and XV acceleration. For me, it plays SD and HD fairly well* at 720P. I have the same software on my desktop running a 1080P monitor from a HD2600 pro, and it is struggling to keep the HD video smooth, so you might be ok, or the video might be just a little choppy (especially when the OSD is up).

* By fairly well, I mean I don't have the fancier de-interlacers running for 1080i content, so fast motion is a little blurred.

You can always try it and see what you get.

[bridgman]

I guess the main question is whether you have tried any of the multithreaded decoder options - either ffmpeg-mt (available in mplayer-mt) or CoreAVC ? I don't think you will be able to reliably decode HD video on a single CPU core (which is all the standard players/decoders are able to use) but with both cores running I think you should be OK. Decoding HD seems to need somewhere between 1.25 and 1.5 cores on a modern CPU.

The multithreaded ffmpeg/mplayer is considered experimental but does seem to work well for a lot of people. There are ppa's available for mplayer-mt, so that should probably be the first thing you try. I would start with the open source drivers that *ubuntu 9.04 installs by default, and Xv output from the player. If you are using the Catalyst drivers you'll want to use -vo gl2 (OpenGL output with multitexturing) and make sure sync-to-vblank is enabled in the Catalyst control center.

CoreAVC is a commercial decoder, only officially available for Windows but there is a CoreAVC-for-linux patch set which appears to make it work on Linux.

[hieronymous]

I have MythTV running on my HD3200. For the open source drivers, you will need a recent kernel ( >= 2.6.30 ), recent xf86-video-ati ( at least 6.12, I think ), and if running 64 bit Xserver 1.5 or better.

This will get you EXA and XV acceleration. For me, it plays SD and HD fairly well* at 720P. I have the same software on my desktop running a 1080P monitor from a HD2600 pro, and it is struggling to keep the HD video smooth, so you might be ok, or the video might be just a little choppy (especially when the OSD is up).

* By fairly well, I mean I don't have the fancier de-interlacers running for 1080i content, so fast motion is a little blurred.

You can always try it and see what you get.

Thanks. Since I'm already running fglrx I think I'll first exhaust my options with it before trying to switch to the open source driver again. I didn't have very good luck with it last time. By the way, what CPU are you using?

[hieronymous]

I guess the main question is whether you have tried any of the multithreaded decoder options - either ffmpeg-mt (available in mplayer-mt) or CoreAVC ? I don't think you will be able to reliably decode HD video on a single CPU core (which is all the standard players/decoders are able to use) but with both cores running I think you should be OK. Decoding HD seems to need somewhere between 1.25 and 1.5 cores on a modern CPU.

The multithreaded ffmpeg/mplayer is considered experimental but does seem to work well for a lot of people. There are ppa's available for mplayer-mt, so that should probably be the first thing you try. I would start with the open source drivers that *ubuntu 9.04 installs by default, and Xv output from the player. If you are using the Catalyst drivers you'll want to use -vo gl2 (OpenGL output with multitexturing) and make sure sync-to-vblank is enabled in the Catalyst control center.

CoreAVC is a commercial decoder, only officially available for Windows but there is a CoreAVC-for-linux patch set which appears to make it work on Linux.

Thanks, definitely some new angles here that I've been woefully unaware of and did not come across in all my searching. I must have been looking in all the wrong places. I found and installed the multi-threaded mplayer and ffmpeg as you suggested by following the instructions here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7391005&postcount=38

which worked brilliantly for me.

The smplayer UI is much better than the one I was using before and the playback is much smoother though still just shy of ideal. It is at least watchable. Even before this my playback in mplayer was better than in mythtv but now it's definitely improved. I still haven't figured out how and where to apply the "-vo gl2" option.

I also changed mythtv to use opengl output for playback, though I'm not sure I did this optimally, or even correctly. I get bad stuttering and audio and video artifacts for 2-3 seconds every time I change channels, which is new. I also get an annoying audio pop about 20% of the time on channel changes. After that video plays much smoother than it used to, with similar results to what I get in mplayer. Yet another problem was introduced however in that some of the OSD displays, like the GUIDE no longer work properly, they flash on very quickly and then disappear. Other OSD displays, like MENU are unaffected. I verified that the problem goes away if I return to the original mythtv playback profile.

These improvements are encouraging enough for me to keep on struggling with it for a while longer since for the first time I'm getting the sense that it might actually be possible to get this thing working to the point where my wife will accept it. The key it seems is learning how to toss the bones just so, or preferably finding someone else who does.

[hieronymous]

Well, still no joy on this end unfortunately and my initial optimism has given way to pessimism. Mplayer is a little improved but still not really smooth. Furthermore it's been somewhat unstable and generally unreliable.

I didn't realize at first that the ffmpeg-mt wouldn't impact Mythtv at all since it evidently has the ffmpeg functionality built-in, and this is what I need to work properly above all. Selecting OpenGL instead of xv-blit in Mythtv results in the Guide display problem I mentioned before, and it doesn't really result in smoother playback as I had thought at first, so I switched back to xv-blit.

It would seem that my only option now is to wait for more proprietary driver updates with the hope that things eventually improve enough, or try switching to the open source driver, which if I understand correctly doesn't support HDMI audio. This is a bit of a PITA since I've had that working pretty well for a while now, and only after much initial difficulty.

Any other thoughts on what I may be doing wrong?

[bridgman]

Something sounds wrong here.

If mythtv can't make use of an external software decoder then it won't be able to make use of an external hardware decoder (eg VDPAU, VA-API, XvBA) either... and that seems really unlikely. I suspect we just need to find a Mythtv guru.

[hieronymous]

Something sounds wrong here.

If mythtv can't make use of an external software decoder then it won't be able to make use of an external hardware decoder (eg VDPAU, VA-API, XvBA) either... and that seems really unlikely. I suspect we just need to find a Mythtv guru.

Hmm, I could be wrong, but I thought I read this somewhere. Then again it may not have been a reliable source. The comment was specific to ffmpeg being built-in, not hardware decoders generally. I'll do some more digging as I may be completely off base.

[bridgman]

I did a quick search; looks like the multithread version of ffmpeg is a compile time option, not a run time option :

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/dev/387505

[hieronymous]

I didn't find much in the way of clear and direct support for my statement about ffmpeg being built into mythtv, but I did find a couple of references strongly alluding to it.


There's this thread here on Phoronix, especially the second page:

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17690

I wish I'd seen that a long time ago, as it seems to speak directly to my current problems(I'm trying to playback smooth 1080P on a 780G board with onboard hd3200 GPU and 2.6 GHz 5050E processor). Sounds like I'm asking for trouble to start with.


And then there's this thread from July on a Mythtv developer mailing list:

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/dev/387505?do=post_view_flat#387505