HD 3xxx AGP cards driver

[sasser]

Hello,

I'm looking after an upgrade: buying an HD3450 AGP version in order to get hardware decoder for 1080p. Looking on AMD website seems that there are no drivers available for AGP version of any HDxxxx.

Is there any support in open-source driver for that card? I'm interesteed in HD video playback and flash movies hardware acceleration, not gaiming.

I'm totaly new to drivers in Unix-like world.. so far I used only the default drivers/settings from the install. I appreciete a hit, or some starting point to understand where to dig to find answers.

Thanks.

[Kano]

Get rid of agp, it is cheaper to buy a new h61 board, pentium g620/630 and 2 gb ddr3-1333. That works but agp is unstable as hell with a card line you want to buy. You can put the money you want to spend on it into a dustbin with the same effect.

[Kano]

its just a matter of time till the system dies and you have got just some more expensive electronic waste lying around.

[sasser]

Get rid of agp, it is cheaper to buy a new h61 board, pentium g620/630 and 2 gb ddr3-1333.

I dissagree Kano.. that AGP card costs around 25$, that will be a minor investment to extend the "life" from of my PC and I don't have money to spent if there is an cheaper solution available. And it may be a more environment friendly sollution, I don't need more performance from my old one, just to play HD..


@Qaridarium
Seems that ATI HDxxxx is my only choice for 1080p playback as I can't find any available nVidia solutions.
But what driver can I use? On the ATI website there si no driver available for AGP versions. I've read about "radeonhd" and "fglrx" drivers, are those OK?

[archibald]

RadeonHD is an old, unmaintained open source driver. I don't know what this provides (I don't think anybody's used it or updated it for several years).

The standard open source Radeon driver should do everything that RadeonHD can do (and more, and faster). It has accelerated 2D and 3D but no accelerated video decoding.

FGLRX is the binary ATI driver that you can download from their website, it has accelerated everything (2D, 3D and video decoding).

[agd5f]

AGP will work out of the box with the open source radeon drivers (and fglrx) with the usual caveats about AGP in general.

[Kano]

And you will not gain anything with oss drivers when you want 1080p playback. You definitely need fglrx + xvba-video + xbmc (via vaapi). Flash can only be hw accellerated when you use win,definitely not using linux. you can play youtube via xbmc as video addon however.

[sasser]

I've upgraded to HD3450 card and I tested a few days trying to make it work.
Currend system setup: athlon 64 3000+, radeon hd3450, slackware 13.37. The video driver is that one included in the distro, I don't know how to find out what driver I use.

Reading about playing 1080p content with hardware acceleration I've found on some forums that I might need a patched mplayer.
So, I've installed the modified libva_0.32 from splitted-descktop.com and the patch for mplayer mplayer-vaapi-latest-FULL.
In a tutorial, the command line for launching the mplayer with vaapi was: mplayer -vo vaapi -va vaapi -ao alsa [movie file]
But after that command, the player window doesn't appear, instead I get the following info in the console:

--CONSOLE-START-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

bash-4.1$ mplayer -vo vaapi -va vaapi -ao alsa demo.mkv
MPlayer SVN-r32819-4.5.2 (C) 2000-2011 MPlayer Team

Playing demo.mkv.
libavformat file format detected.
[matroska,webm @ 0x901bfe0] Estimating duration from bitrate, this may be inaccurate
[lavf] stream 0: video (h264), -vid 0, Video x264 1080p @ 40 Mbps
[lavf] stream 1: audio (ac3), -aid 0, -alang eng, Audio ingles AC3 2.0 @ 448 Kbps
VIDEO: [H264] 1920x1080 0bpp 29.917 fps 0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
Load subtitles in ./
libva: libva version 0.32.0-sds2
libva: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva: Trying to open /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//r600_drv_video.so
libva: va_openDriver() returns -1
[vo_vaapi] vaInitialize(): unknown libva error
Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device.
================================================== ========================
Opening audio decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders
AUDIO: 48000 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 448.0 kbit/29.17% (ratio: 56000->192000)
Selected audio codec: [ffac3] afm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg AC-3)
================================================== ========================
AO: [alsa] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Video: no video
Starting playback...
A: 101.9 (01:41.8) of 102.2 (01:42.1) 10.4%


Exiting... (End of file)

--CONSOLE-END-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Looking in /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/ I don't find r600_drv_video.so. What is r600_drv_video.so? Where can I find it?

Opening the movie without vaapi, like: mplayer demo.mkv opens up the movie window playing the movie and the console shows:

--CONSOLE-START-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

bash-4.1$ mplayer demo.mkv
MPlayer SVN-r32819-4.5.2 (C) 2000-2011 MPlayer Team

Playing demo.mkv.
libavformat file format detected.
[matroska,webm @ 0x901bec0] Estimating duration from bitrate, this may be inaccurate
[lavf] stream 0: video (h264), -vid 0, Video x264 1080p @ 40 Mbps
[lavf] stream 1: audio (ac3), -aid 0, -alang eng, Audio ingles AC3 2.0 @ 448 Kbps
VIDEO: [H264] 1920x1080 0bpp 29.917 fps 0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
Load subtitles in ./
================================================== ========================
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
Selected video codec: [ffh264] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg H.264)
================================================== ========================
================================================== ========================
Opening audio decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders
AUDIO: 48000 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 448.0 kbit/29.17% (ratio: 56000->192000)
Selected audio codec: [ffac3] afm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg AC-3)
================================================== ========================
AO: [oss] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Starting playback...
Movie-Aspect is 1.78:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
VO: [xv] 1920x1080 => 1920x1080 Planar YV12
A: 6.4 V: 5.6 A-V: 0.748 ct: 0.003 0/ 0 95% 14% 2.1% 50 0


************************************************
**** Your system is too SLOW to play this! ****
************************************************

Possible reasons, problems, workarounds:
- Most common: broken/buggy _audio_ driver
- Try -ao sdl or use the OSS emulation of ALSA.
- Experiment with different values for -autosync, 30 is a good start.
- Slow video output
- Try a different -vo driver (-vo help for a list) or try -framedrop!
- Slow CPU
- Don't try to play a big DVD/DivX on a slow CPU! Try some of the lavdopts,
e.g. -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts lowres=1:fast:skiploopfilter=all.
- Broken file
- Try various combinations of -nobps -ni -forceidx -mc 0.
- Slow media (NFS/SMB mounts, DVD, VCD etc)
- Try -cache 8192.
- Are you using -cache to play a non-interleaved AVI file?
- Try -nocache.
Read DOCS/HTML/en/video.html for tuning/speedup tips.
If none of this helps you, read DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html.

A: 16.2 V: 9.6 A-V: 6.562 ct: 0.003 0/ 0 149% 14% 3.6% 170 0

Too many video packets in the buffer: (202 in 33662952 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.

--CONSOLE-END------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The player window appear and the movie plays pretty ok till the end, but the CPU load is very high (close to 100%).