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

[Florian Philipp]

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