Video playback with 780G/HD3200

[susikala]

Hi,

I'm running Ubuntu Jaunty (kernel 2.6.28) on a A780FullDisplayPort (HD3200) board / Phenom 9550 (2.2GHz), and have a few problems with video playback with the fglrx driver (8.12). I use mplayer, but I get the same issues on VLC, so I don't believe they're player-specific.

- When I use the xv video output, I get teary video, which I understand is "ok", since the fglrx driver doesn't yet support vsync (at least according to the MythTV FAQ).

- When I use the OpenGL video output, everything is pretty much fine (I have vsync always turned on), only CPU usage constantly stays around 100%, and at some point mplayer complains about the CPU being too slow to play the file (the file being a 720p h264 video). However, when I use mplayer with ffmpeg-mt, multi-threading works well and none of the cores ever gets above 40% usage. Despite that, after around 30 seconds-3 minutes of playback, the video starts randomly getting jerky. Not all the time, but every 20-30 seconds.

I tried pretty much everything, played around with the -vo gl options, tried different audio outputs, gave more RAM to the IGP, all to no avail.

I already had the problem while using Ubuntu Intrepid with 2.6.27/fglrx 8.11, so I already ruled out it having anything to do with the kernel or the fglrx version. If anything, the upgrade to 8.12 actually reduced the occasional jerking.

This problem really baffles me. The videos play perfectly 99% of the time, it's just those random jerks which are a real bother.

If anyone has a similar problem, or the same board / chipset working well with video playback, could you share your experience / configuration?

[forum1793]

I also have 780g and am using fglrx with mythtv, xine, and mplayer. xv didn't use to work. I can't remember when but at some point I was able to use xv in all of these programs. I'm using slackware 12.1. Looking through the package manager I see it has libXv and libXvMC. Both are 1.04. Perhaps slackware-12.0 didn't have the libxv package.

googling libxv and ubuntu brings up some hits including some devs (developmental). You should give these a shot.

Before these I always used xshm (x11). This worked fine for me also. Opengl worked OK but not at full screen and 1080i, maybe even 720p. It just flashed between frames. This doesn't really make sense to me. I would think that opnegl would use the HD3200 acceleration features and so should be faster. Anyway, xv is probably working best out of the options.

[legume]

Hi,
- When I use the OpenGL video output, everything is pretty much fine (I have vsync always turned on), only CPU usage constantly stays around 100%, and at some point mplayer complains about the CPU being too slow to play the file (the file being a 720p h264 video)

This has been reported on here before.

If your setup will work with 8-10 then using mplayer like this

mplayer -vo gl:yuv=4:force-pbo:ati-hack

may fix it.

8-11/12 give a green screen when used with these options.

[Peruna]

For me force-pbo with ati-hack started to work with 8.11 and 8.12 when I compiled mplayer from svn trunk.
I highly recommend compiling it from svn trunk since there are other optimizations too. At least when comparing to mplayer coming with Ubuntu 8.04.

[legume]

For me force-pbo with ati-hack started to work with 8.11 and 8.12 when I compiled mplayer from svn trunk.
I highly recommend compiling it from svn trunk since there are other optimizations too. At least when comparing to mplayer coming with Ubuntu 8.04.

You are right, newer mplayer has changed the behavior.

I just tried on my r500 card and I now see the same Cpu usage using gl with or without the pbo+hack parameters.

Although I notice with 8-12 it still uses 30% more Cpu than on 8-10, no where near as bad as with old mplayer and no hack, but if I really needed to use this (r500 OSS has xv vsync now) I would stay reverted to 8-10.