Crashes / Hardlocks during video-playback

[dolittle]

Hello together!

First of all: Please excuse my bad english. I'm trying to give my best.
Second: I am not as much experienced as many of you. So i ask for your patience.

Following drives me crazy: With fresh installed fglrx-driver(many versions, later more for it...) and enabled 2D/3D-acceleration my system completely freezes when i playback a divx-file(v 5). With a persistend sound on the headphones the only thing i can do is pressing the reset switch. This situation is repeatable although it is not always at the same point during the playback. When i play a "normal" mpeg-files/DVD everything seems fine.

I tested the memory with memtest86 and it reported that everthing is fine after one complete loop.

Here some details to my system:
- CPU AMD64 4000+
- RAM 2 x Infinion 512MB
- Graphic Card ATI Radeon X1800GTO
- Sound Card Audigy 2

And now another thing that give me the creeps: I tested many different Distros(Ubuntu 6.06, 6.10, 7.04, FC 5+6, Debian 4.0). The _only_ Distro that works is: Ubuntu 6.06

Why is that so? What is so different in this Version of Ubuntu? I know that there are different versions of the fglrx-driver in each distro when you stay with the repos but even when i looked thru the release-notes of the drivers i can't make out some information that is pointing me in a direction. Due to the lack of knowledge what is under the 'hood' i am completly clueless.

Even with the drivers directly from AMD/ATI there is no difference in the behavior of the system.

Another question would be for me: How can i monitor this lockups? How can i get debug-code that can be used for further investigation? The logs are - as far as i can remeber - empty of error-codes concerning fglrx.

Many thanks in advance

dolittle

[hyfans]

well, as a generanl user.

first check your fglrxinfo, make sure it do show ati's strings.

then you should try different video out in your video playback application (eg, kaffeine/xine/mplayer/ or etc.)

i encounted similiar freeze when doing this.

tell you my story, in my ubuntu 7.04, i use fglrx 8.35.5(patched) on a customized kernel 2.6.20.

after installing driver, i found i only can use opengl2
output in mplayer, otherwise it will give me a bluetint video when i play some rmvb files. so i
stick to opengl2 in mplayer.

another example is kaffeine/xine, where i got serious X crash.

like this: i choose a rmvb file will crash X when kaffeine is playing some avi/divx file.

strange enough, things go well when i make opengl as default output plugin.

also xvideo output will make kaffeine not be able to play mp3 files.so if i want mp3 playback and stable rmvb playing, i should choose opengl output in kaffeine setting although i heard opengl output will make performance down.

[dolittle]

In the meantime i made a fresh install of Debian 4.0. I am using the vesa-driver.

By now there are no problems during the playback of the files that are causing the crash with enabled fglrx-driver on the previous installs. I think i can comment out the player or the libs responsible for playback.

Next step will be to make a fresh install of the newest drivers from AMD/ATI. Will post more later on...

dolittle

[Fragadelic]

Try setting the driver in xine or mplayer to X11 rather than any of the accelerated drivers.

Also try to remove the fglrx drivers and go back to standard X.org drivers and still pick the X11 engine for the video players.

If this makes no difference, try disabling audio and see if it works. If it works, then something is up with the audigy driver portion of als and the kernel and it may not like the card.

[dolittle]

Thank you both for your tips.

As i can tell by now my problems have disappeared.
Where is now the difference?
1.Took the newest driver from AMD/ATI an build individual packages.
2. Did not configure the OverlayType(normal would be ovt=Xv)
3. Playback through OpenGL not XV(btw: some miscoloured files only work correctly in this mode...)

I still consider this as "in testing" but i am happy with the results.

cheers

dolittle

*Update*
I made a new install of Ubuntu 7.04 with the drivers from AMD/ATI and everything seems fine.
The difference is same type as in Debian 4.0: I did not use the XV-Playback but OpenGL.