No XVMC(Mpeg Accel) with 8500 and 100.14.03 Beta

[mbehensky]

Hi, all-

(Sorry about the cross posting; I didn't get any replies over at nvnews.net)

I just purchased a brand new Gigabyte GeForce 8500GT for my home theatre PC. It didn't work under FC6 Linux with the 9755 drivers I had installed, so I was pleased to hear of the 100.14.03 Beta driver's release.

I installed the beta, and while things worked much better than with the "vesa" driver I had been using, XVMC doesn't seem to be available.

It looks good in the Xorg.0.log file:
<snip>
(II) Loading extension XVideo
(II) Loading extension XVideo-MotionCompensation
<snip>

But doesn't work with mythtv or mplayer (Here's the mplayer output):
mplayer -vo xvmc -vc ffmpeg12mc dvd://

<snip>
VIDEO: MPEG2 720x480 (aspect 3) 29.970 fps 7500.0 kbps (937.5 kbyte/s)
vo_xvmc: X-Video extension 2.2
vo_xvmc: No X-Video MotionCompensation Extension on :0.0
Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device.
<snip>

The problem is specific to the 8500GT; I put my old 6800 nvidia card back in and xvmc worked again.

Unfortunately, I need xvmc for acceptable performance for hdtv playback in mythtv, so it would be great if this got fixed. If anyone has had success with xvmc and the 8800 or 8600 series, let me know..


Max Behensky

[Michael]

Originally Posted by mbehensky

Hi, all-

(Sorry about the cross posting; I didn't get any replies over at nvnews.net)

I just purchased a brand new Gigabyte GeForce 8500GT for my home theatre PC. It didn't work under FC6 Linux with the 9755 drivers I had installed, so I was pleased to hear of the 100.14.03 Beta driver's release.

I installed the beta, and while things worked much better than with the "vesa" driver I had been using, XVMC doesn't seem to be available.

It looks good in the Xorg.0.log file:
<snip>
(II) Loading extension XVideo
(II) Loading extension XVideo-MotionCompensation
<snip>

But doesn't work with mythtv or mplayer (Here's the mplayer output):
mplayer -vo xvmc -vc ffmpeg12mc dvd://

<snip>
VIDEO: MPEG2 720x480 (aspect 3) 29.970 fps 7500.0 kbps (937.5 kbyte/s)
vo_xvmc: X-Video extension 2.2
vo_xvmc: No X-Video MotionCompensation Extension on :0.0
Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device.
<snip>

The problem is specific to the 8500GT; I put my old 6800 nvidia card back in and xvmc worked again.

Unfortunately, I need xvmc for acceptable performance for hdtv playback in mythtv, so it would be great if this got fixed. If anyone has had success with xvmc and the 8800 or 8600 series, let me know..


Max Behensky

Looks like it may be a bug. I ran into this problem too with the same GPU. The final driver release will probably address the bug.

[krionius]

Originally Posted by Michael

Looks like it may be a bug. I ran into this problem too with the same GPU. The final driver release will probably address the bug.

It's not a bug. it seems a long term decision:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=90484

[DarkFoss]

wow... Intel's starting to look better and better as the future preferred gpu for Linux.

[halfmanhalfamazing]

So people with high end geforce 8xxx cards can't even watch DVD movies?

[mlau]

Originally Posted by krionius

It's not a bug. it seems a long term decision:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=90484

Well a few weeks ago an Intel employee started collecting suggestions
for a new hardware-assisted video playback API for X. Maybe nvidia
is waiting for this spec to be finished?

[krionius]

hope so. http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ch/022893.html

I have read it. Any upcoming news on this one? They finished the thread in end of march.

[immudium]

It's always unfortunate when you lose a potentially useful feature like that. However, I'm not really too concerned about it. I've never been able to get MythTV working acceptably with XVMC. It's ALWAYS been plagued by some sort of weird audio buffer problem. And I've always thought MythTV's software video renderers looked much better especially with HDTV content. XVMC seems to me to be something that was designed specifically for playback of lower res mpeg2 content on very low end VIA or old Pentium3 hardware. Not something you would be running a new GeForce 8800 on. I'd rather see NVidia developers spend their time on more useful endeavors, like say, H264 or better Xorg composite support and related bug fixes.