AMD's UVD2-based XvBA Finally Does Something On Linux

[chrno]

R600 doesn't have UVD. It was a pretty big chip already and it had enough shader power and bandwidth to do a fair amount of decode acceleration on the shaders.

I'm eyeing a PCI-based graphics card with a "Radeon HD 2400 Pro" (RV610) GPU on it for a completely F/OSS-compatible HTPC. Any guesstimate as to whether or not it too will have "enough shader power and bandwidth to do a fair amount of decode acceleration on the shaders"? In particular, do you think it will allow (eventually!) playback of 1080p material?

If anyone knows of a PCI-based graphics card with a faster GPU and a decent shot at F/OSS drivers with decode acceleration I'd like to hear about that too.

[Chad Page]

I'm eyeing a PCI-based graphics card with a "Radeon HD 2400 Pro" (RV610) GPU on it for a completely F/OSS-compatible HTPC...
If anyone knows of a PCI-based graphics card with a faster GPU and a decent shot at F/OSS drivers with decode acceleration I'd like to hear about that too.

There are 4350 PCI cards out there too, which have more shader power and might get working UVD2 someday.

I don't know how Noueavu's doing with the video decoders on GeForce cards.

[murphy]

Problem

Hi,

does anyone know, how to deal with this message?

$ vainfo
libva: libva version 0.31.0-sds3
libva: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva: Trying to open /usr/lib/va/drivers/fglrx_drv_video.so
libva: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA API version: 0.31
vainfo: Driver version: Splitted-Desktop Systems XvBA backend for VA API - 0.5.1
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
xvba_video: XVBA_CreateContext(): status 11
X Error of failed request: BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation)
Major opcode of failed request: 0 ()
Serial number of failed request: 12
Current serial number in output stream: 12

[bridgman]

I'm eyeing a PCI-based graphics card with a "Radeon HD 2400 Pro" (RV610) GPU on it for a completely F/OSS-compatible HTPC. Any guesstimate as to whether or not it too will have "enough shader power and bandwidth to do a fair amount of decode acceleration on the shaders"? In particular, do you think it will allow (eventually!) playback of 1080p material?

If anyone knows of a PCI-based graphics card with a faster GPU and a decent shot at F/OSS drivers with decode acceleration I'd like to hear about that too.

Another vote for either HD4350 or 4550 (same GPU core, different RAM and clocks). If you want to pick up something from an earler generation I would go with at least HD2600/HD3650.

[makomk]

Actually.....the 7xx was very very different compared to the 6xx asics.

The major difference between uvd, and uvd2 is the mpeg decode part.

Yeah, that makes sense. Just tried this on my Radeon 2600 HD, and h264 decoding seems to work fine. MPEG2 and MPEG4, on the other hand, don't. (OSD/subtitles don't work, but that's going to be a bug in the mplayer patch.)

It's just good that it supports freedesktop.org's "standard" api for video accel VA-API will be highly likely get implemented more since more or less both amd and intel are supporting it.

Not really. This requires an unofficial modified branch of VA-API that's not been accepted upstream yet.

[energyman]

The Hd Vid decoding support on GF7xxx Cards under Win is kinda limited, but annyway Nvidia supports more Generations of Cards with VDPAU

not really. 8XXX, 9XXX and 250 are basically the same generation. No, not basically. They are.

[gbeauche]

Not really. This requires an unofficial modified branch of VA-API that's not been accepted upstream yet.

All core libVA changes are integrated upstream, but not released yet (version 0.31). You can check the GIT tree. The VA/GLX extensions are still work-in-progress but the API stabilised. There will be another change to support MPEG-4 ASP needs of VDPAU.

[non7top]

I got mplayer crashing. Both current svn mplayer and the one provided by script checkout-patch-build.sh.

Gentoo users can try mplayer ebuild from arcon overlay with vaapi USE flag.

Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
[VD_FFMPEG] VA API accelerated codec.
[VD_FFMPEG] Trying pixfmt=0.
Unsupported PixelFormat -1
Could not find matching colorspace - retrying with -vf scale...
Opening video filter: [scale]
The selected video_out device is incompatible with this codec.
Try appending the scale filter to your filter list,
e.g. -vf spp,scale instead of -vf spp.
[VD_FFMPEG] Trying pixfmt=1.
Unsupported PixelFormat -1
Could not find matching colorspace - retrying with -vf scale...
Opening video filter: [scale]
The selected video_out device is incompatible with this codec.
Try appending the scale filter to your filter list,
e.g. -vf spp,scale instead of -vf spp.
Unsupported PixelFormat -1
Unsupported PixelFormat -1
Selected video codec: [ffh264] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg H.264)


Starting playback...
[h264 @ 0x8987120]decoding to PIX_FMT_NONE is not supported.
[h264 @ 0x8987120]decode_slice_header error
[h264 @ 0x8987120]no frame!
Error while decoding frame!
[h264 @ 0x8987120]decoding to PIX_FMT_NONE is not supported.
[h264 @ 0x8987120]decode_slice_header error
[h264 @ 0x8987120]no frame!
Error while decoding frame!

Too many audio packets in the buffer: (4099 in 4123594 bytes).
Maybe you are playing a non-interleaved stream/file or the codec failed?
For AVI files, try to force non-interleaved mode with the -ni option.

FATAL: Could not initialize video filters (-vf) or video output (-vo).

[energyman]

We all know how well front end and backend efforts like this have played out in the past. *cough* pulseaudio *cough*

Using a bandaid solution is just bad project planning and is probably linux's greatest flaw.

how about you stop posting crap?

va-api is a good choice because it abstracts away the backend.
There are a lot of these constructs. Like gcc.

And it has nothing in common in any way with pulseaudio which is a sounddaemon. completly different stuff.

[energyman]

Really? Because I can tell you as a matter of fact even including bumpgate effected cards the ATI's have a higher failure rate then the Nvidia cards. For every Nvidia card that was replaced ATI cards were replaced 10 x more. These include the 7500, 2600HD, X1900, X850, 9000 Pro.

In fact there is a whole section in Apple engineering notes to agents under the heading "ATI distorted video" that all say "Replace the card". In fact most of the extended beyond warranty coverage on some machines such as the eMac had to do with ATI graphics failing.

and of course you have some source to support your claims? Or are you just talking out of your a??

Nvidia is currently tied up in three lawsuits thanks to bumpgate. Ati? How many?

And Apple was so unhappy with ATI that they just bought two complete month of production. Yeah, that spells 'unhappiness'.