[Savage40] SuperSavage (ThinkPad T23) and xv overlay

[The Eye]

On Thu, Dec 22, 2005 at 08:19:34AM +0300, Oleg wrote:
> Alex, he/she talks about vsync problem. Savage XVideo driver doesn't support 
> VSYNC capability (XV_SYNC_TO_VBLANK), however savage DRI driver support 
> it :-(
> 
> I also must note, that matrox xvideo driver doesn't have such flag 
> (XV_SYNC_TO_VBLANK), but all video output is synced and nicely triple 
> buffered :-)

since I'm still interested in playing DVDs on my T23, another followup
on this (is the reason that this one post has never been followed up by
alex because it's stupid/doesn't make sense, or because there's nothing
you can do about that?).

Further things I realized:
* When I bought another used T23 for my parents, there was Windows98
installed on it when I got it, so I thought "what the hell" and put
mplayer for windows on it and tried it out. Lo and behold, there is no
problem at all playing video under windows, it all looks extremely
smooth as it should. So this, afaict, is not a limitation of the chip or
the player-software but rather of the driver.

* On http://www.probo.com/timr/savage40.html it is mentioned that the
SuperSavage Chip can do "xvmc". I saw that mplayer is capable of using
that in its output, so I thought I'd give it a try and test whether that
solves my problem.

Alas it doesn't. When running mplayers ./configure with --enable-xvmc,
it complains that it needs an "adapter specific library" for xvmc "like
e.g. XvMCNVIDIA". And it doesn't find that for supersavage since, of
course, it isn't there. So I was wondering, does such a library for
SuperSavage exist, and if yes, where can I find it?

* I have now also tried other movie players like xine and vlc (are there
others that can play the same amount of formats?), and they show the
exact same behavious, leading me to the opinion that this is in fact a
driver-issue.

* Question, since there is no date-stamp on the probo.com webpage: from
when is the news-update about "1.1.27t drop now available"? And since it
all seems to concern some versions of xfree86, is there any way to use
things like that with xorg-x11 as it is right now in Gentoo? Because
there is a sentence that caught my eye: "The LCD expansion code in the
xvideo support that I stole from S3 was just buggy. I think that has
been the cause of MANY xvideo problems. I know it affected the
SuperSavage, but probably affected others as well. This has been
repaired. I can now run any resolution on the IBM T23 panel, and the
xvideo support runs just fine. It even shows up on the TV display, using
the S-vido connector."

what does "just fine" mean? I would interpret that in a way to say that
problems like mine are gone? Or is that some really old news-item from
2002 or something and concerns the basic working of xvideo, i.e. the
fact that overlay is possible at all, not that it happens to look ugly?

Thanks for any thoughts and answers that might lead to me being able to
watch movies on my laptop. Most of all since I've just realized that I
can watch movies without any trouble on an old AMD-K6-2 400 MHz Desktop
with an ATI Rage Pro video card ... shouldn't be any trouble for an 800
MHz Computer then and a newer graphics chip, now shouldn't it *sigh*. At
least that's what I thought before I bought it.

-- 
Michael Hellwig  aka  The Eye                 olymp.idle.at admin
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