Getting Xv to work with radeon driver and r500 card

[Christian_L]

Is the video interest mostly from "everything being on YouTube these days" or are we talking about actual movie playback, tv watching etc ?

Movie Playback is very important for me. It was nice back when XV basically worked in fullscreen with my card (< 8.40)...

[timmydog]

I don't think we have released all the overlay documentation yet. We were planning to do video stuff *after* 3d although there does seem to be a lot more interest in video than we initially expected. Is the video interest mostly from "everything being on YouTube these days" or are we talking about actual movie playback, tv watching etc ?

I bought a 690G motherboard + energy efficient AMD X2 (after the documentation release announcements) specifically to use as a PVR, so full screen DVD and TV is a must for me.

At the moment I'm not watching TV through the PVR because the frame update isn't quite fast enough and after a while it irritates me. I can cope with watching 1 or 2 recorded shows, because I know I can switch back to the TV and the drivers will get better...

The 3d acceleration is good enough for me, but I'm only a casual gamer.

Tim

[bridgman]

Yep... and that's the main reason we planned to add video support *after* 3d rather than before. Shaders are great for certain back-end video tasks, but before we can feed raw video buffers into the shaders we need the same lower level infrastructure (essentially DRM) as 3d.

Just to make sure this is clear -- if video support worked the same way as pre-5xx ASICs and enabling open source vide development was just a matter of releasing overlay information, I think we would do that in parallel with 3d rather than afterwards. We will take a look to see if there are any easy options (eg maybe only supporting one video format with the overlay but one which popular players can work with) just in case, but I expect that we're going to need the 3d foundation in place before we can get good open source video support on the Avivo parts.

[libv]

In my case, it's scientific research. We need to display streaming video from a digital camera. The camera provides teh stream in UYVY-oncoded form.

The new overlay hardware is no longer able to display this directly.

[CrystalCowboy]

Is the video interest mostly from "everything being on YouTube these days" or are we talking about actual movie playback, tv watching etc ?

In my case, it's scientific research. We need to display streaming video from a digital camera. The camera provides teh stream in UYVY-oncoded form.

[bridgman]

The way I understand it, the cards through r500 ought to have mostly functioning 2d engines. I believe I heard that the everything-is-3d approach didn't start until r600.

The transition to everything-in-3d happened in two stages -- video processing in 5xx, 2d acceleration in 6xx.

The doc release does contain some registers relating to the overlay, but I'm not sure if it's complete or not.

I would be surprised if it were complete, since we didn't even look at it (I was too busy trying to figure out what happened to LVTMA and I2C ), but it's possible.

I'm more puzzled by the fact that even the D1OVL_ENABLE register is not used in the Radeon driver. Obviously the radeon driver produces something for an overlay, so why does it? I'm going to test out the overlay using different color spaces when I get the chance. Maybe if I use it with RGB video, it works properly.

Might just be HW defaults or the BIOS code, not sure. I'll ask the devs whether they have looked at 5xx overlay -- I kinda doubt it

However, these two lines in the specs are puzzling:

ACrYCb 2101010 or ARGB 2101010
CbACrA or BGRA 1010102

Those are pixel formats. To what do they refer? These are both supposed to be 32 bit formats that the overlay can be set to.

Those are the 10-bit video modes -- rather than 8 bits for each component and 8 bits for alpha it uses 10 bits for each component and two bits for alpha.

[TechMage89]

Overlay is more important to me right now than 3d. 3d would be nice, but for now, if I need it, the fglrx driver can do it. It can't do Xv, at least not for me. The way I understand it, the cards through r500 ought to have mostly functioning 2d engines. I believe I heard that the everything-is-3d approach didn't start until r600. I do want to be able to watch DVDs and such on my computer, though, and Xshm is painfully slow.

The doc release does contain some registers relating to the overlay, but I'm not sure if it's complete or not. I'm more puzzled by the fact that even the D1OVL_ENABLE register is not used in the Radeon driver. Obviously the radeon driver produces something for an overlay, so why does it? I'm going to test out the overlay using different color spaces when I get the chance. Maybe if I use it with RGB video, it works properly.

If that is the case, it appears the released docs specify that the overlay can be set to ACrYCb format, so it might be possible to rejuggle say YUV video into a format it can handle and still get a measure of improvement over Xshm.

However, these two lines in the specs are puzzling:
ACrYCb 2101010 or ARGB 2101010
CbACrA or BGRA 1010102

Those are pixel formats. To what do they refer? These are both supposed to be 32 bit formats that the overlay can be set to.

[ivanovic]

Working Xv is a *must have* for me. I am using TVTime (yes, it is already ancient) and it does rely on this very feature. This is IMO currently the best and easiest program to "just watch" analog TV.

So personally for me having this work is more important than the 3D part since I would just switch over for some hours to the proprietary driver for gaming anyway.

Though probably the whole stuff on 3D acceleration takes more work than Xv, so it is better to have those specs and code examples earlier since it needs more time to have it working.

Of course I would feel best if all the specs would be released at once (and before new years eve). But probably sanitizing the specs really takes a whole lot of time, so any progress on that front is really welcome. Looks like it could be a *great* future for all the AMD/ATI users out there due to the heavy effords regarding open drivers.

[Uchikoma]

"Actual" videos in various sizes, shapes, and forms ^^; I use mplayer for the majority of my video watching. Overlay is Xv.

Various res' including HD res videos. Card is an ATI x1800, or on my laptop, a mobility x1400.

[bridgman]

I don't think we have released all the overlay documentation yet. We were planning to do video stuff *after* 3d although there does seem to be a lot more interest in video than we initially expected. Is the video interest mostly from "everything being on YouTube these days" or are we talking about actual movie playback, tv watching etc ?

Maybe it's time for another survey

I doubt the radeon devs have spent any time at all on overlay support yet. The main change from 4xx to 5xx was that some of the older video processing hardware built into the overlay was replaced with shader code. Using shaders gives us more flexibility and the potential for higher video quality but it also means a lot more driver work.

I think the original poster's theory is correct, that the app is feeding in one video format and expecting the overlay hardware to do the colour space conversion... which it doesn't do any more. Right now overlay and video support is on the list for *after* we get 3d info out to the developers -- I think that's still the right sequence, do you all agree ?