# radeon driver, rv630 chip, XVideo possible at all?

## i92guboj

Hello, a simple question, is there any way to make XVideo work with the "radeon" driver? Any chance to see a fullscreen video with this driver on my chip?

Thanks beforehand.

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## Jaglover

I was just looking at this post: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-789392.html

He hasn't defined his VIDEO_CARDS and all drivers are pulled in, it seems there's another version  of OSS driver called "radeonhd", did you try it?

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## i92guboj

Hello, 

 *Jaglover wrote:*   

> I was just looking at this post: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-789392.html
> 
> He hasn't defined his VIDEO_CARDS and all drivers are pulled in, it seems there's another version  of OSS driver called "radeonhd", did you try it?

 

I try both of them from time to time, they both have mostly the same problems. I haven't tried radeonhd lately, but there hasn't been any new release lately either so I doubt anything is going to be different. I keep trying them from time to time, and I find only deception. I can live without 3d stuff, I am not much of a gamer. But xvideo is really a must for me.

Thanks for the response, though  :Smile: 

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## pdr

For Xvideo you need DRI. I had problem with the RV670(?) (740 chipset) not supported by either - no DRI and hence no video scaling by mplayer. New version of radeon (not radeonhd) came out - oh, probably a month or two ago and my 740 chipset was supported. Good times had by all - especially since the previous incarnation (a 780 chipset) had worked fine with radeonhd..

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## i92guboj

I've tried even with the git stuff in the x11 overlay. Recompiled my whole server, mesa, and the rest of the drm stuff, to no avail. Maybe the next year.

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## Jaglover

I recall an other member of another forum had similar problem with his laptop. Officially his chip was supported by OSS driver, but his particular video card based on that chip wasn't - sic! Furthermore, ATI proprietary driver did not support that card either. Go figure, laptop thing.   :Rolling Eyes: 

This computer of yours, is it a lappy?

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## i92guboj

 *Jaglover wrote:*   

> I recall an other member of another forum had similar problem with his laptop. Officially his chip was supported by OSS driver, but his particular video card based on that chip wasn't - sic! Furthermore, ATI proprietary driver did not support that card either. Go figure, laptop thing.  
> 
> This computer of yours, is it a lappy?

 

Nope.

But it's certainly coming to an end and will probably end in the trash can in a few months. The current situation is that the last catalyst driver that works ok is 9.6. When I use 9.7 or 9.8 I can't use my second monitor, it goes standby as soon as I enter X. 9.6 works fine, but it doesn't officially support anything above kernel 2.6.28.10. Go figure. Of course, if ATi had a bugtracker or some interest in their user community, it would be trivial to report the regression, but hey, they haven't because they don't care about us at all (please, show me that I am wrong, I would really love it).

All my hopes are in radeon/radeonhd, because fglrx clearly is not going to work for me in a few months at most. But neither radeon or radeonhd are at an acceptable level of functionality right now. I couldn't care less about 3d, but playing a video fullscreen it not asking too much, is it? They have some other problem, like a bad performance. 2d performance for both oss drivers is just awful. However, the git branch of radeonhd seems to work much better, but with no XVideo either. So the real question is whether when fglrx dies for me there will be left any driver that works or not. I have to wait for the next X release, whose deadline has already passed, but the release hasn't happened. However, I doubt that the driver will be working by that time, whenever that finally is.

I bought this card because I wanted to upgrade from an old nvidia 6200, which worked just fine. I knew it was going to be a hell because I've already had experience with lots of ati card, so I don't blame anyone for my own fault. The problem was that there wasn't anything better based in nvidia chips for agp at the time (as there isn't today). And I didn't want to update the whole computer. Now I feel that I should have considered it better. The performance gain doesn't worth the trouble at all, and now people tell me that to be ok with radeon or radeonhd I should have bought a 5 years old card! That's stupid, because it wouldn't have made any sense changing my card at all.

But I am going to stop writing before I say something that a moderator shouldn't be saying   :Laughing: 

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## Jaglover

Slightly off topic, but i bought a low-power VIA barebone with integrated 1.5 GHz VIA CPU and integrated VIA graphics for my wife. Cost me $89 from Newegg. To my surprise it plays HD video no problem. The CPU does SSE3 and GPU does iDCT. For my own rig I did my homework and bought nVidia GeForce 8500 GT. Here is why:

http://saul.homeunix.org:8000/tmp/nVidia_PV.pdf

Didn't cost a fortune from eBay and certainly does what expected.

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## yangman

What specific issues are you actually having with XVideo?

Latest releases of both radeon and radeonhd should do XVideo on rv630.

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## i92guboj

I am not having any issues, it just doesn't work at all. I can view videos in mplayer using the x11 output driver perfectly, though, in a gameboy-like size, and wasting my cpu horribly. opengl also works, at an horrid rate of course, it's unusable but that's not strange, I am just telling. When you say "latest releases", what exactly do you mean? In portage there's:

```
x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-6.12.2-r1

x11-drivers/xf86-video-radeonhd-1.2.5
```

With these versions there's no way to get dri working on anything equal to (or above) r600, correct me if I am wrong. I haven't been able, that I know for sure. At least in my case, enabling DRI in my xorg.conf corrupts my screen completely, it's impossible to see anything at all (though X starts, and fvwm works, I know because my fvwm key binding to close X works).

I've also tried the git branch for radeon (not for radeonhd though), from the x11 overlay. For this, I had to recompile the whole Xorg, using the ebuilds from these same overlay, as well as mesa, libdrm and a few other things. After that, the radeon driver worked mildly ok with Option "DRI" "on", faster than the official numbered release. However, XVideo didn't work either, and I am not sure that DRI was indeed working, but at least I could start with that option in my xorg.conf.

Thanks everyone who answered.  :Smile: 

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## pdr

You're corrected   :Laughing: 

As I said, I have whatever the 740 chipset is - RV6xx - and it works with radeon (relative recent development). Also my previous motherboard/case worked for a long time now - a 780 chipset (defintely RV6xx) using radeonhd.

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## DaggyStyle

if you need 3d with the ati open source driver, check this topic:  https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-786786-highlight-.html

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## xenon

I have an r600 family video card; XV and tear-free video works since a few months ago, and openGL definitely doesn't, so your situation is a bit puzzling. I'm using the radeon (not radeonhd) driver.

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## yangman

 *i92guboj wrote:*   

> I am not having any issues, it just doesn't work at all.

 

Well, that's certainly an issue.

Post your Xorg.0.log and xorg.conf so we can diagnose this.

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## mikkoc

I have an rv620 and XVideo works just fine with the following:

kernel 2.6.31-rc7

mesa-9999

xf86-video-ati-9999

libdrm-9999

xorg-server-1.6.3

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