Using HDMI With ATI Linux Drivers

[bridgman]

>>Opengl video rendering works quite nice though (with e.g. Mplaver). If only I could have it working in MythTV

What is the issue with MythTV ?

[conchpapa]

I just registered to share my experience with this issue.

First, here is my setup:
TV - Dell W3201C - 32" LCD
Mobo - Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H mATX (VGA, DVI, Component, S-video, HDMI) using the HDMI connection
HDD - 160 GB WD SATAII
Optical - Normal DVD drive
TV Card - ATI TV Wonder 200
Network Card - Belkin F5D7000 (I think that's the number)

I started off trying Fedora 8, but that was a very bad experience for a beginner like myself.

I switched to Ubuntu 7.10 and was very pleased by the ease it setup. But no matter what I did or tried - I could not get the sound to play. The only setup that would pass any sound was using a VGA connection and normal Line-out from the on-board sound.

I finally installed Windows XP and there was an update available through the windows update that made the HDMI available in the sound control panel. I have a feeling that if that file was somehow transitioned for Linux users, we would have a better experience with the sound options through an HDMI connection.

[peol]

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=xor...3d80a9fa4c883d

A new patch was made live just a few minutes ago in the git-repos, which enable the atombios to handle HDMI-connectors as DVI's, this should be something interesting for you guys. :-)

[Koying]

>>Opengl video rendering works quite nice though (with e.g. Mplaver). If only I could have it working in MythTV

What is the issue with MythTV ?

Mostly black screen in opengl, with artefacts or part of a frame at the top. I just tried with nvidia, and it works.

[Koying]

Forget what I said. I use a HDMI dongle and it was unscrewed :-(

I cannot get beyond 720x480, though... Looks like an EDID issue...

[FireBurn]

I guess you mean no Xv in radeonHD, because there is in fglrx.
Unfortunately, it's of no use to me because the upscaling causes awful aliasing in the video
Opengl video rendering works quite nice though (with e.g. Mplaver). If only I could have it working in MythTV

No there is apparently no hardware for Xv so neither the Fglrx or RadeonHD will support it

[FireBurn]

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=xor...3d80a9fa4c883d

A new patch was made live just a few minutes ago in the git-repos, which enable the atombios to handle HDMI-connectors as DVI's, this should be something interesting for you guys. :-)

Thank you so much! What a nice Christmas Present

I can finally stop using the fglrx driver

Mike

[bridgman]

It's not exactly "no hardware for xv", just that in the 5xx and above GPUs we went from having a full-featured video processor in the overlay to doing most of the scaling and colour conversion with shaders, which allowed higher quality and more flexible video processing algorithms. The Avivo implementation for... um... "non-Linux operating systems" is built around DXVA so we had to pretty much start from scratch for Linux, and as I understand it TexturedVideo was the obvious choice for our first shader-based video implementation on Linux.

I believe it is possible to do shader-based scaling (ie nice pretty video ) with xv and overlay on 5xx and above but I'll know for sure after we get more of the video-related info together in early 08. Right now we're focusing on info for 2d and 3d acceleration plus trying to find answers for the wierd issues the RadeonHD developers are seeing on specific cards.

Having said that, some new chips from other vendors seem to be leaving out the overlay block entirely so it wouldn't surprise me if TexturedVideo started to replace xv over time. Presumably one day someone will be asking for video on a spinning cube, and I imagine TexturedVideo is probably required for that.

[chrisr]

Presumably one day someone will be asking for video on a spinning cube, and I imagine TexturedVideo is probably required for that.

Hmm, if the spinning cube is someone's desktop then I'm astonished that people aren't asking for this already. Personally, I always end up disabling Compiz and Desktop Effects precisely because so many of my desktop applications (e.g. xine, wine/WoW) misbehave with it.

[bridgman]

>>Personally, I always end up disabling Compiz and Desktop Effects precisely because so many of my desktop applications (e.g. xine, wine/WoW) misbehave with it.

Yeah, this is something I want to understand better over the holidays. It seems to me that if you are running Compiz and you aren't (somehow) forcing all your apps to render indirect through the server you're going to have the app and the desktop fighting for the screen and flickering as a result. The question is whether you can flip a configuration switch in the 3d stack and have everything automatically render indirect, or whether this needs to be switched on an app-by-app basis.

This is where "redirected direct rendering" comes in AFAIK, although I have never seen mention of flicker in the posts from Kristian or others. Oh well, something new to learn.

EDIT -- Good news: looks like a few people are starting to comment on the flickering issue with Compiz & direct rendering apps; see Kristian's blog :

http://hoegsberg.blogspot.com/2007/0...rendering.html

Bad news : Hmm, looks like Sun has a patent on redirected direct rendering. Not sure if will be a problem :

http://http://www.patentstorm.us/pat...26-claims.html