[Savage40] SuperSavage (ThinkPad T23) and xv overlay

Alex Deucher agd5f at yahoo.com
Mon Mar 6 08:17:17 PST 2006 


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

> note: normally I don't top-post but the last time i just left in
> minimal
> context it apparently was only clear to myself ... as in it is
> possible
> that there are ppl who don't have this list archived into it's own
> folder and use threading to view it ..
> 
> anyway, sorry for the delay in answering, I was on holidays ..
> 
> The behaviour I am seeing and which is about the only thing making me
> unhappy re my Thinkpad T23 is that, when I watch a movie (be it a DVD
> or
> some avi I ripped off of a DVD or some movie-trailer .mov off of
> apple.com, the behaviour is always the following:
> 
> As long as the picture shown in the movie is relatively stationary
> and
> there is not much movement, everything looks just great. But when
> there
> is either a scene with a lot of motion (car-chase, explosions,
> whatever,
> yer know, the fun stuff) or when there is a (real or animated) camera
> flyover type of scene (like e.g. the camera was mounted on a
> helicopter
> or plane and is flying through some valley or whatever), i.e.
> whenever a
> lot of the picture is changing, the picture doesn't change as a whole
> (which is what i've seen with any other graphics adapter so far. if
> the
> adapter is too slow for the movie, the motion won't be fluid, but the
> picture will always be one whole picture) but is sliced up
> horizontally
> into 3 or 4 parts, which will be changed individually. this always
> looks
> quite horrible. A person called Oleg (see below) said this was due to
> the fact that the Savage XVideo driver doesn't support VSYNC,
> whatever
> that means (sorry, I am not a programmer).
> 
> Thanks for any kind of help you could give me ... (alas, on a laptop
> it's not that easy to just change the gpu).

Hmmm... sounds to me like the laptop can't feed the data to the overlay
fast enough.  Right now, we just use memcpy() to copy the buffers from
system ram to vram and reformat them.  It should be possible to use the
pixel formatter on the supersavage to help performance, but I'm not
sure how similar/different the pixel formatter on the supersavage is to
savage4 or savage2000 (my guess is that it's closer to the savage2000
one).  We could also use hostdata blits with DMA to copy copy data from
system ram to vram, but once again, I'm not sure how it's done on
supersavages.

Alex

> 
> On Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 10:06:13AM -0800, Alex Deucher wrote:
> > 
> > --- 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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> 
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