[Savage40] SuperSavage (ThinkPad T23) and xv overlay

[Alex Deucher]

--- The Eye <mhellwig at gmx.at> wrote:

> 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?).

what problems are you having exactly?  Xv was working fine on the
mobile savages last time I played with it. 

> 
> 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.

The Windows driver has support for hardware MC and iDCT (XvMC) and also
uses hostdata blits to transfer the data to vram.  We use memcpy().

> 
> * 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?

Part of the problem with XvMC is that there is no generic interface
like libGL that you can link against that will dynamically open a
hardware driver.  the app has to be linked against the hardware xvmc
driver directly.  S3 released XvMC code for the IGP based savages
(prosavage, twister, etc.), however the code didn't seem to work and no
ever fixed it or merged it.  All the savages have XvMC support in
hardware, however other than that old S3 code drop, there is no support
in the Xorg drivers.  Plus the various savage overlays are different
enough that I don't think the code drop would work on a supersavage.


> 
> * 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.

What was the behavior again?

> 
> * 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
>    check out http://eyesun.dhs.org/key.html for gpg public key
>         and don't hesitate to look at http://laerm.or.at


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