Re: [gentoo-user] intel HD graphics 4000 and viewing DVDs

[Allan Gottlieb]

On Sat, Dec 01 2012, Florian Philipp wrote:

> Am 28.07.2012 10:22, schrieb Florian Philipp:
>> Am 27.07.2012 22:57, schrieb Michael Mol:
>>> On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 4:39 PM, Florian Philipp
>>> <lists@×××××××××××.net> wrote:
>>>> Am 27.07.2012 22:22, schrieb Michael Mol:
>>>>> On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 4:10 PM, Allan Gottlieb <gottlieb@×××.edu> wrote:
>>>>>> I am getting a new laptop. (likely dell 6430).
>>>>>> The two graphics options are intel HD 4000 and nvidia NVS 5200M.
>>>>>> Dell is as expected suggesting the 5200M.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I do not need 3D or fast response.  Dell hinted that DVDs might not play
>>>>>> with the intel HD 4000.  This seems weird to me as the 4000 is supposed
>>>>>> to be a big improvement over the 3000 and I can't believe dell or others
>>>>>> would have sold laptops that can't play dvds
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Any comments or experiences?
>>>>>
>>>>> My Duron 750MHz was able to decode DVDs in realtime. After that, all
>>>>> you're doing is blitting (or using xv) the frames to the screen. I
>>>>> would be absolutely shocked if the Intel HD 4000 GPU couldn't handle
>>>>> that basic of a 2D acceleration function.
>>>>>
>>>>> Now, DVDs use MPEG2. Blu-Ray uses h.264, which is a much harder beast
>>>>> to decode in realtime. It's possible the HD 4000 GPU can't handle
>>>>> hardware decode of h.264, but I don't know. I've never looked into it.
>>>>> (Software decode of 1080p h.264 on my Phenom 9650 worked somewhat, but
>>>>> highly active scenes would cause frame drops.)
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I've experienced issues playing DVDs on fullscreen with the OSS radeon
>>>> driver. Therefore I'm cautious of assumptions that something works
>>>> simply because the input is easy to decode. Upscaling to large displays
>>>> with high resolutions can be an issue.
>>>>
>>>> I'm not saying the Intel driver cannot handle it. I'm just saying you
>>>> should try it or look for reports.
>>>
>>> How high is 'high' resolution? I was upscaling to 1600x1200 using an a
>>> Radeon 9600; that card would now be almost ten years old. A bit later,
>>> I did the same on a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 using an i845-based Intel
>>> graphics card. Here's the line from lspci, as run in May of 2007:
>>>
>>> 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation
>>> 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01)
>>>
>>> Hardware scaling a 2D image is one of the most trivial
>>> hardware-accelerated options GPUs perform. If someone had difficulties
>>> upscaling a 480p (roughly what DVDs are) to 1080p at 24 or 33fps, I
>>> would be very highly suspicious of a software misconfiguration. That
>>> kind of scaling should even be comfortably doable in software on any
>>> modern x86-derived processor. (With the plausible exclusion of the
>>> Atom CPU)
>>>
>>
>> 1920x1080, on-board Radeon HD 4250. I haven't diagnosed it further
>> (except of playing around with mplayer2 options) as it was easier to use
>> the closed source driver.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Florian Philipp
>
>
> I realize this thread is pretty stale but since I talked bullshit and
> just now realized it, I want to correct myself:
>
> Since updating the kernel to 3.5 forced me to update the X server beyond
> 1.11 which in turn forced me to update ati-drivers to a version that no
> longer supported my Radeon HD 4250, I had to look into my issues with
> the open source driver.
>
> It turns out, my problems had two reasons:
> - I didn't enable KMS and DRM for radeon in the kernel
> - I didn't have x11-drivers/radeon-ucode installed
>
> Both resulted in a fully functioning X server that
> - could run glxgears just fine
> - could (with some tuning) render videos in DVD quality with opengl output
> - was too slow for videos in any higher resolution
>
> Regards,
> Florian Philipp

Thanks for the response.  I should say that I have indeed purchased the
laptop with intel graphics and it works fine with DVDs.

allan