[MPlayer-users] Radeon frambuffer use if Radeon is not primary display? (all in one)

[Brian J. Murrell]

On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 09:21:08PM +0300, Nick Kurshev wrote:
> 
> Hello, Brian!

Hi again Nick.

> I'm not sure - but in Russian shops you may buy such card
> (PCI versiona are available for us ;)

Cool.  Hopefully I can find one here.

> He was wrong ;)
> radeon_vid IS NOT framebuffer driver. Framebuffer driver IS radeonfb ONLY !!!

I am sorry.  I was using radeon_vid to mean everything in the
mplayer/drivers/radeon directory.

> A'rpi is excellent programmer but he still misunderstand some HW questions.

So you are saying that the framebuffer and overlay (radeon_vid right?)
will work with PCI Radeon cards?

But won't work with TV-Out on Radeon cards.

There is some very confusing sections in video.html.  First:

  2.3.1.A.2. ATI cards
  
  A few word about ATI's TV-out:
  Currently ATI doesn't want to support any of its TV-out chips under
  Linux. Below is official answer from ATI Inc.:
  
  
  > Hello!
  > 
  > On your pages you wrote that you support linux developers.
  > Currently I participate with mplayer project (www.mplayerhq.hu)
  > I'm interesting with enabling TV-out on Radeon VE chips during
  > movie playback. I would be glad to add this feature to radeonfb driver
  > (which can be found in CVS tree of mplayer project at main/drivers/radeon).
  > Do I have a chance to get any official technical documenation?
  We will not provide TV out related documents due to macrovision concerns.
  Also mpeg2 decoding is something that we MAY consider in the future but not
  at this current time. This is again due to proprietary and 3rd party
  information.
  
  Pity isn't?
  
So that leads me to believe that TV-Out on Radeons will never work.
However there is also in the same document:

  2.3.1.14. Rage128 (Pro) / Radeon video overlay (radeon_vid)
  
  radeon_vid and rage128_vid provides support for the BackEnd Scaler on
  ATI Radeon and Rage128 (Pro) chipsets. It was designed and introduced
  as analog of mga_vid driver, so you can use it in the same way!
  But main goal of this driver usage is VESA driver.
  Simply because VESA enables TV-out on ATI's card but Backend scaler is
  used after mode switching. This implementation outputs video stream on
  both: TV-screen and CRTC display simultaneously. (It slightly degrades
  quality of video output but it's much better than nothing). Sorry! I
  couldn't find out any video overlay's related information on ATI
  pages. (I planned to implement it through int 10h calls). But it was
  very easy to implement this stuff through reading/writing Radeon
  ports.
  NOTE: XXX_VID technology is perfectly undocumented and maybe in the
  future this stuff will be fully rewritten. This is the first public
  release of driver.

Which makes me believe that TV-Out does work on Radeons using VESA.
So which is it?  Does TV-Out work on Radeons or not?  In which modes
does it work?  XFree and/or Gatos, VESA, framebuffer, others?

Is VESA with radeon_vid acceptable in performance?  Is it better or
worse than XFree86 and/or Gatos?  Is it better or worse than
framebuffer?

> Full list of features you can find out on the sites of their vendors ;)
> Just sync and read faq.html from mplayer's DOCS - I've tried to answer
> this question there.

I am synced and I looked at faq.html.  I see nothing in there about
framebuffers, video overlays or anything that we are discussing here.

> But what about those adertisment which declare that HDTV is regular practic for
> Western Europe and America?

Everything I can find says HDTV is only 1920x1080, not 2000x2000.
HDTV is moot though.  I will not be expecting to fully fill an HDTV's
bandwidth for a long time to come.  I want to see stuff on my shitty
ol' analog TV today.

> I meant HDTV ;)

See above.

> Probably your MB was designed for socket-7 or slot-A
> In this case it would be better to upgrade MB upto socket-370 or socket-A ;)

None of this is the point.  I don't have the money to buy a new
processor, a new board and a new video card.  I need to work with what
I have got right now.

> Please DON'T MIX radeon_vid and radeonfb.

OK.  My appologies.

> radeonfb is general framebuffer for radeon chips.

Right.

> But radeon_vid is driver for video overlay which even doesn't know what is graphics mode ;)

OK.  Got it now.

> If it tells you something - radeon_vid works only with OV0_* video registers.

Sorry, I don't know much about the inner workings of video hardware
(as must be obvious by now :-)

> It can be run over radeonfb, over VESA BIOS and in the future even over X11.

OK.  The role of radeon_vid is becoming clearer.

> > Uhm, unless you cripple a G400 (so that it essentially is a single
> > headed card instead of the dual heads it does have) it does *NOT* have

> Is G400 - single head?

Nope.  Dual head.  But you need to shift the BES from the first video
port to the second one in order to get HW scaled TV-Out because the
card has only one HW scaler (even though it has two video ports) and
TV-Out only works on the second head.  Normally the scaler works on
the first head.  There is some magic in Mplayer to do all of this but
at that point you have dedicated two video ports (expensive) to the
job of simply getting HW scaled TV-Out on a framebuffer.

> I guessed that they can be only dual head.

AFAIK they are.

> Radeons have no such problems since there is only one overlay unit
> which can output signal on CRTC, TV-out, DFP or on all heads simultaneously.

More confusing info.  I don't whether to believe that TV-Out works
with Radeon or not.  In framebuffer mode or just X?

> Because matroxfb driver set can do that.

But no others.  ~sigh~

> Or maybe you'll want to implement radeon_i2c driver to enable TV-out? ;)

I'm not a hardware hacker I'm afraid.

> Not sure: on my Duron-700 + Radeon VE I'm losing only rare slices of frame
> on very dynamic stories of DVD. (Slice it's 1/20 if frame). Approx: 1 slice
> per 50-200 frames.

Well that sounds not bad.  And Radeons+VESA do give TV-Out right?

> FYI: computer's world is not finished on x86 architecture.
> But VESA is available only for such systems.

I only care about x86 right now.  That is what I have and that is not
changing any time soon.

So maybe I have to back-off my instance on using framebuffer.

If I resolve to use XFree86 as my display engine, what is my best
choice for:

- PCI hardware
- inexpensive
- TV-Out
- HW scaling

b.

-- 
Brian J. Murrell