[Savage40] SuperSavage (ThinkPad T23) and xv overlay

[Jérôme Warnier]

Just to let you know that I own a T23 running Debian Sarge (with XFree86
4.3), and that video has never been a problem anymore.
Most of the time, when I hear DVD playing problems on Linux, it is only
related to the reading speed of the DVD-reader (activating DMA on it
solves it right away).
But I don't remember the technicalities enough to be of more help
anymore.

Hope it helps.

Le vendredi 17 février 2006 à 15:56 +0100, The Eye a écrit :
> 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.
>