Advice: Drivers for AMD780G with HD3200 + Intrepid + MythTV

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I only seem to find guidelines or outdated (pre-Intrepid) documentation etc that mention "Oh you may need this" (egRI) but never mentions how I go about installing the eg: DRI DRM etc.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