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AMD Fusion - How to use in a HTPC?

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  • AMD Fusion - How to use in a HTPC?

    Hi,

    I'm the owner of a AMD A4-3400 based system (is this evergreen based?) which I want to use as a HTPC. What is currently the best way to do so? I googled and tried out a lot the last days but cannot get it working well.

    Using the fglrx-driver all is working, but software decoding is too slow for HD-Channels with a very high datarate, I get a lot of artifacts then Using VAAPI+XVBA-Wrapper is unusable

    Is it worth trying the open source driver? I've read that the HDMI audio is not working, and later that there are patches to get it working, which release do I need to get HDMI audio working on this card?

    Then I've read there is a VDPAU state tracker for radeon in Mesa 8.1, is it working well? better than the not working VAAPI? Should I compile Mesa from git for this? Do I need a special driver version for this?

    The current situation for using a AMD based HTPC is very very confusing, I hope you can help me here

  • #2
    It's Evergreen, yes. FOSS drivers only accelerate mpeg2, so unlikely to improve your movie experience.

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    • #3
      That are bad news Are there any plans to support H264 in the near future?

      As an alternative... Has anybody got fglrx and libxine+VAAPI+XVBA working and can tell me how? I got a lot of image errors while trying this.

      I hope it was no failure to buy an AMD system here...

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      • #4
        I've exactly the same configuration. However, must say that performance is not as my expected. Ended up buying a cheap Nvidia GT520 to do all video acceleration at the moment.

        The AMD proprietary driver's video acceleration (xvba) is not supported in most software package. The vaapi bridge is not well maintained.

        The FOSS driver is promising. Once it got H.264 vdpau support I think it will be widely popular. Actually the vdpau infrastructure looks more robust and easier to program that most software (flash, xbmc, mplayer, etc) support it now. Too bad it is developed by nvidia (though is open) that every graphic company seems hate and no one want to follow the suite).

        The lack of a standard API is really hurting.

        If I have a chance I would now go for maybe a sandy bridge core i3 which has better video acceleration and is backed by Intel's open source efforts.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by balta View Post
          Are there any plans to support H264 in the near future?
          Yes.

          Originally posted by balta View Post
          Has anybody got fglrx and libxine+VAAPI+XVBA working and can tell me how?
          I doesn't know about libxine, but XBMC-XvBA just works for supported formats (list of supported formats is limited).

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          • #6
            I already tried XBMC and it is working well, but the experimental PVR-Integration is far away from good I prefer to use VDR + xineliboutput.

            So I will try my best using the software decoding, and hope for a working h264 acceleration in the VDPAU version soon.

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            • #7
              Hi, I'm running an htpc (based on nvidia ion, but this is pretty generic stuff) and have tried it with the opensource drivers. Using xbmc, you can enable shader (GLSL) decoding, which AFAIK decodes the video using the GPU, but without using a specific API. IOW it uses the shaders. Now with this enabled, the nouveau driver played back 720p content just fine, and 1080 almost (esay scenes passed ok). I would be surprised if the radeon/catalyst drivers didn't at least equal the nouveau driver.
              Another thing you might want to look into is multithreaded decoding using mplayer. by simply passing -lavdopts threads=n where n is the number of your CPU cores. Using this I have been able to play back Sintel (1080p version) on my netbook based on a Core2Duo [email protected]. I honestly hope that bulldozer fares at least as well.

              Personnaly I'd stop trying to use these APIs (vdpau etc) for the moment, and work around the issue, since the performance is there.

              Serafean.

              PS : I use xbmc along with tvheadend, it plays back channels just fine, although all recording functionality is only web-based.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by Serafean View Post
                shader (GLSL) decoding
                Shader decoding? Isn't shaders used in XBMC only for colorspace conversion?

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                • #9
                  @balta

                  With FernetMenta you can use

                  DISCONTINUED - XVDR Plugin for VDR. Contribute to pipelka/vdr-plugin-xvdr development by creating an account on GitHub.


                  DISCONTINUED - Standalone XVDR addon for XBMC. Contribute to pipelka/xbmc-addon-xvdr development by creating an account on GitHub.


                  You should disalbe the other pvr addons first. Did you try it that way?

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by RussianNeuroMancer View Post
                    Shader decoding? Isn't shaders used in XBMC only for colorspace conversion?
                    Getting in way over my head... All I know is that in the menu there is GLSL written, and with it I can watch 720p content using nouveau, which I can't without it. You may be more knowledgeable about what it is.

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