Overlay (XVideo) support on X1250?

[WonderClown]

I have a new mobo with integrated Radeon X1250 video, and it appears from my various efforts at getting video overlays (xv/XVideo) to work that it's just not supported. The open-source radeon driver does not support my chipset, so I'm left with fglrx. I've installed the latest 8.42.3 driver, and I get these warnings when I try to boot with overlay enabled:

(WW) fglrx(0): Textured Video is currently not supported on IGP hardware.
(WW) fglrx(0): Video Overlay not supported on AVIVO based graphics cards.

I have tried various combinations of the VideoOverlay, OpenGLOverlay, and TexturedVideo options, and nothing works. Without the xv capabilities, full-screen video playback is awfully choppy.

Is there anything I can do that I haven't tried yet? Any hope of the newer open-source drivers being up to snuff anytime soon?

UPDATE: The solution is to use the new opensource RadeonHD driver -- even without acceleration video is perfectly smooth. See below.

[sark666]

I was looking for the same info. If you find anything out please follow up. Anything I find I'll post here and to the thread I started.

So the x1250 is not supported by the radeonhd driver or are you referring to the xorg ati driver. I also noticed the avivo driver. Using ubuntu 7.10 btw. Do any of these work with the x1250? Also did you try using opengl for video playback?

[WonderClown]

So the x1250 is not supported by the radeonhd driver or are you referring to the xorg ati driver. I also noticed the avivo driver. Using ubuntu 7.10 btw. Do any of these work with the x1250? Also did you try using opengl for video playback?

It does not seem to be supported by the xorg driver, though I actually didn't try very hard. Perhaps I should give that another go. I haven't tried the radeonhd driver nor the avivo driver, as both of those seem to be alpha stage or worse at the moment. I briefly tried to get set up to compile them from source on my Debian etch system, but gave up pretty quickly as it became clear that I'd need to jump through a lot of hoops just to get them to compile, and in the end I'm not interested in running alpha-quality video drivers just to get Xv support. But I am very much looking forward to either project maturing, though there is no guarantee that they'll support Xv on this chip either.

OpenGL playback works (mplayer -vo gl or gl2), but it's choppy at fullscreen. This hardware should be fully capable of very smooth fullscreen video playback. My old machine was much slower/older hardware (also an ATI card -- an older one supported by the xorg driver), but it was able to do fullscreen video with no problem.

[greg]

You could try to use the mplayer SDL driver with mode switching: it switches to the best matching video mode and so only has to do a little bit of scaling and sometimes no scaling at all.

[WonderClown]

You could try to use the mplayer SDL driver with mode switching: it switches to the best matching video mode and so only has to do a little bit of scaling and sometimes no scaling at all.

That actually seems to work pretty well, so long as I'm using mplayer. I find that Flash movies (i.e. YouTube) are also more choppy on this hardware than on my old system when blown up to full screen -- I guess that Flash player must use Xv when available.

Anyway, thanks for the tip.

[greg]

Flash doesn't use Xv (yet). This means even simple pixmap copy operations are slow for some reason. I guess I'll be getting an NVidia based mainboard...

[WonderClown]

Just to report on my progress -- I just installed the new RadeonHD opensource driver (1.0.0 compiled from git tree), and even without acceleration of any sort video is perfectly smooth, just using the x11 driver (no scaling) or SDL (scaling and/or fullscreen). So, the opensource driver, just a few months in development and lacking any sort of acceleration, is faster than fglrx using all the acceleration it can muster on my particular chipset. Yay for opensource.

[greg]

It'll still use TONS of valuable CPU time just for scaling the video. It's no replacement for Xv.

[WonderClown]

It'll still use TONS of valuable CPU time just for scaling the video. It's no replacement for Xv.

Not a problem for me -- I have a dual-core CPU, so the video can have one core all to itself as far as I care. I don't do much multitasking while video is playing. Anyway, I'm sure the RadeonHD devs will be adding acceleration soon enough. They were so fast in getting the 1.0 release out!

[Kano]

Because they jumped from 0.0.4 not to 0.0.5 but to 1.0.0