A couple of years back I bought an Acer Aspire One netbook / mini-notebook specifically because it claimed to offer HD video playback and HDMI connections. Almost as soon as I bought it, AMD stopped supporting the included graphics card, even though those cards were still being sold in notebooks (thanks a bundle, AMD!).
At present, I have it working using the legacy proprietary drivers, but these haven't been updated in ages, restrict me to kernel 3.4 or earlier, and aren't particularly stable! Every so often I get a black screen on booting, and once its started doing that, it takes forever to "unstick" it again!
Word is that the open source drivers now offer HD video playback via vdpau. I use vdpau on my desktop (nvidia gfx), so I'm quite familiar with compiling software to use that. What I haven't found anywhere is a simple description of what software is required to get hardware video acceleration on the open source drivers. I see lots of obscure references to various versions of mesa, etc, but no definitive instructions on how to get it all to work.
I'm not particularly interested in 3D graphics or games. I just want HD video, preferably available through the hdmi socket as well for large screen presentations.
My system is Slackware64-14.0. The graphics card identifies itself via lspci as an ATI RS880M [Radeon HD 4200 series] (and a matching hdmi audio device).
I'm really hacked off with AMD now, despite having been a loyal customer since the days of the K6-2 processor. An "Idiot's Guide" to getting HD video working under the open source drivers would be much appreciated!
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Pete
At present, I have it working using the legacy proprietary drivers, but these haven't been updated in ages, restrict me to kernel 3.4 or earlier, and aren't particularly stable! Every so often I get a black screen on booting, and once its started doing that, it takes forever to "unstick" it again!
Word is that the open source drivers now offer HD video playback via vdpau. I use vdpau on my desktop (nvidia gfx), so I'm quite familiar with compiling software to use that. What I haven't found anywhere is a simple description of what software is required to get hardware video acceleration on the open source drivers. I see lots of obscure references to various versions of mesa, etc, but no definitive instructions on how to get it all to work.
I'm not particularly interested in 3D graphics or games. I just want HD video, preferably available through the hdmi socket as well for large screen presentations.
My system is Slackware64-14.0. The graphics card identifies itself via lspci as an ATI RS880M [Radeon HD 4200 series] (and a matching hdmi audio device).
I'm really hacked off with AMD now, despite having been a loyal customer since the days of the K6-2 processor. An "Idiot's Guide" to getting HD video working under the open source drivers would be much appreciated!
--
Pete
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