Is AMD ever going to fix the critical video playback issue with Radeon HD2600 cards?

[tuxdriver]

First round of testing:

This took quite a bit of time.I've tried the drivers with different kernels and with various window managers and DEs (KDE,Gnome,LXDE,Openbox,IceWM,JWM,...) and Compiz Fusion.

9.11 runs fine.Everything works: OpenGL,3D,Compiz effects,but the 2D performance (resizing and moving windows) is extremely slow,using massive amounts of CPU time.
Unaccelerated 'Shadow Buffer' is 100x faster for
these operations.


Xine
----
With Xine/gXine, the video still suffers from the zoom + fat scanlines issue.The player outputs this message when started from the commandline:

lacing: 0
lacing: 3
lacing: 0
lacing: 0
lacing: 0
lacing: 3
lacing: 0
lacing: 0
lacing: 0
lacing: 3
lacing: 0
lacing: 0
lacing: 0
lacing: 0
lacing: 0
lacing: 0
lacing: 3
lacing: 0
lacing: 0
lacing: 0
lacing: 3
lacing: 0

.
.
.
and so on


MPlayer
-------
MPlayer plays the videos perfectly (without errors). Tried it with Xv video and OpenGL/2 output. Xv seems smoother when Compiz effects are enabled. With OpenGL output (single and multitextured),the video has occasional stuttering and uses a bit more CPU. XvMC output is not supported on ATI cards.


Coming up: Playback tests with VLC and tests with older versions of the Catalyst driver.

[tuxdriver]

Do you think this should also happen on SP2?

I'll do some SP2 tests later.

[tuxdriver]

VLC
----
VLC crashed with most of the videos I tried to play (unsupported formats/containers?),but I finally found some mp4 and flv videos that would run.
Xv works fine. Nice and smooth playback without glitches.


Xine/gXine (cont'd)
-------------------
There's another problem with Xine: visualizations (like the scope and spectrum) are broken as well and tend to lock up the system/driver,forcing a hard reboot.
Strange,cause everything works fine with legacy cards (such as the R200 Radeons) and fglrx.


Older drivers
-------------
There's no difference with older drivers such as Catalyst 8.7

[tuxdriver]

Conclusion:
-----------
Xv (and OpenGL) video is broken with Xine/gXine,but works fine with other players.

The other issue is windows-specific: Broken WMV video acceleration with VMR9 (renderless) on WinXP (SP3)

[tuxdriver]

I've managed to fix the bad video colors/corruption in WinXP by installing the latest Windows Media Player runtimes. But that's only half of the problem.

The real issue is still there:
No WMV video acceleration with the Video Mixing Renderer. It's really bad - VMR is more than 2x slower than the 'Legacy Renderer' (CPU load goes up to 100%).

[bridgman]

I remember reading that there was a Control Center option to enable WMV acceleration. Not sure if it is still there but can you look ?

Older versions of the Windows Media Player are also apparently missing some flag required for WMV acceleration, not sure of the details though.

[tuxdriver]

Yes,the option is still there and it's enabled by default.

[tuxdriver]

Just tried the latest opensource 'radeon' driver with this card and Xv playback with Xine works like a charm.
No garbled video / stripes, no tearing and much better 2D performance than the bug-ridden fglrx/Catalyst driver.

[tuxdriver]

Looks like video acceleration on Windows is broken even with the EVR renderer.

There's even a warning on the Media Player Classic Home Cinema page:

http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/

Warning for ATI users : VC1 acceleration has been broken since the Catalyst 8.6 release. If you experience such a thing, please revert to the 8.5 build.