Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: BT8x8

[Chris Brennan]

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Wow ... quit a bit to absorb ... Forgive me if these next set of
questions sound a bit dumb ...

Will kaffeine and/or kmplayer know to use my /dev/video0 device? I
tried getting (g)mplayer to do this and for the life of me, I could
not figure out how to make it use that device :/

I've got a fair amount of experience in setting up X to Play video's
(of various sizes, lengths and formats) and for getting 3D games such
as Doom3/UT/Q3A (Btw, all these games work flawlessly for me, I get
good hardware audio support and all the games are usually played on
the highest settings. The exception being Doom3, I play one step down,
too many objects moving at once on screen tends to bog down my
AMD64/X2 4200+ (2.2GHz/ea). But my question is this, XVIDEO/XV/OpenGL
are all prerequisites of these games. If they are working for the
games, then shouldn't the overlay's be working for  my TV Card as well?




Duncan wrote:
> Chris Brennan <xaero@××××××××××.net> posted
> 47B66180.3000001@××××××××××.net, excerpted below, on  Fri, 15 Feb
> 2008 23:07:28 -0500:
>
>> xawtv gives me a window and when I right click, I can choose what
>> format and region and all that jazz, but I get no picture.
>>
>> tvtime produces the following error:
>
> [reformatted]
>> *** tvtime requires hardware YUY2 overlay support from your video
>> card  driver. [...]  If unsure, please check with your
>> distribution to see if your *** X driver supports hardware
>> overlay surfaces.
>
> I don't touch proprietaryware so talk to someone else about that or
> try the newest free drivers, which are supposed to support the R3xx
> series chips including 3D.
>
> However, I can say this based on video behavior in general (and it
> worked the same on MSWormOS 98, with Nvidia hardware when I first
> switched to Linux, and now with the Radeon R200 series stuff I'm
> running now as it was the newest with freedomare 3D support for
> awhile, so this would appear to be platform independent)...
>
> When the overlay is working properly, particularly when there's
> nothing playing, it should be quite apparent it's not a standard
> window.  The overlay will normally be blue-screen (tho I've rarely
> seen pink or orange or red, but always solid color), and doesn't
> obey normal window rules (no transparency, often no resizing, etc),
> as it's an "overlay".
>
> Overlays are definitely a feature of the hardware.  Most video
> cards will have it, but some won't have the functionality exposed
> in the drivers. If you don't have it, anything that must use it, no
> other choice, will be broken on your system.
>
> Fortunately, while it tends to be the lowest CPU most efficient
> method of playing video, most software video players and the like
> have other choices as well.  The overlay option is Xv, but most
> software can use one or more of standard surface mapping, OpenGL,
> xshm (generally more efficient than standard surface mapping, less
> than Xv), or SDL video rendering.  (Of course SDL can in turn use
> OpenGL and a couple others.)
>
> Unfortunately, a lot (perhaps most?) TV capture hardware must use
> the overlay, no other choice for it.  That's reasonable as it's
> definitely most efficient and least complicated for the hardware to
> access, but if your video hardware or drivers don't support it,
> your SOL.
>
> So what I'd suggest is confirming that your video hardware and
> drivers support it, then trying with something like kaffeine or
> kmplayer (the video players I use).  If you can get the overlay
> working there, then you at least know it's working before you try
> to get the TV capture hardware going.
>
> As for your video drivers, as I said, the R3xx chip family is
> supposed to be supported with the newest open drivers, but I don't
> believe the 3D at least is fully stable, yet.  Hmm... just checked,
> they've updated, it now says "quite stable", but that's still not
> just "stable".  This is with pre-release xf86-video-ati (Gentoo
> package name) 6.7.19x (upstream version) with Mesa 7.0.x.
>
> Gentoo's packages, mesa-7.0.2 is ~arch (and I have it merged here),
> xf86- video-ati-6.7.197 is ~arch but hard-masked:
>
> # Joshua Baergen <joshuabaergen@g.o> (27 Mar 2007) # Release
> candidate ATI driver
>
> So you can try unmasking it and see how it goes if you want.  As I
> said, upstream calls it "quite stable" now, so it should work, tho
> there'll be further changes as it continues to develop and fully
> stabilize.
>
> Some Radeon links from the x.org and dri.freedesktop.org wikis.
> The first links the second but the link tends to get lost on the
> page, so I put it here, too.  The second is a portal page, with a
> bunch of links to other resources, some of which look quite
> encouraging.
>
> http://www.x.org/wiki/radeon?highlight=%28radeon%29
> http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/R300_Portal
>
> I'm /guessing/ that with the free drivers, you'll have overlay
> support without much problem.  If not, at least with them you'll be
> able to get community support, something that's not so easy to get
> (or give) when the driver's a not so well supported black-box.  Of
> course, you can check the documentation and/or ask and see. (As I
> said, I don't do proprietary, but if I were to do so, I'd certainly
> do NVidia, as at least they have decent Linux support even if it is
> proprietary.  ATI Linux support of their closed drivers has always
> been patchy at best, and of course the community can't support them
> as they are closed.  At least ATI's working with the community on
> open drivers now as you're probably aware, but it's going to be a
> good year before stable drivers come out of that project.)
>
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