I have been struggling with a new myth build lately and have hit a wall on a particular issue. I have a Gigabyte GA-MA78G ATX mobo with onboard ATI HD 3200 graphics adapter. I am trying to get HD video playback (mostly of recorded ATSC TV) to be clean, smooth and free of tearing and other anomalies.

I was able to clear up the jittery video by using the ATI Catalyst 8.5 driver from ati.amd.com, however during video playback I always get horizontal tearing.

Gigabyte GA-MA78G ATX, w/ onboard ATI HD 3200
Athlon 64 X2 5000+
2GB ram
Mythbuntu 8.04
HDHomeRun
Using HDMI to TV or DVI to monitor.

I have tried multiple driver releases, including the ATI driver in the ubuntu repositories (which don't even allow HD playback at all) to the binary download from ATI (v. 8.5). I have also tried various deinterlacer settings within myth but that doesn't change much since the I can reproduce the tearing in MPlayer, VLC Player, SMPlayer and Myth.

I am hoping someone on here has previously resolved this issue and can point me at a driver setting or some other thing that I haven't found yet in my many hours of research.

Thanks,
R

I have the same tearing problem with a 9800pro. I finally just gave up on the closed-source ATI drivers and went back to using the plain old "radeon" driver. So my video doesn't tear, but I can't use any of the 3d desktop effects.

If you figure out how to get rid of the tearing make sure you post it. I'd like to use the ATI drivers if I can get past that issue.

I have the same tearing problem with a 9800pro. I finally just gave up on the closed-source ATI drivers and went back to using the plain old "radeon" driver. So my video doesn't tear, but I can't use any of the 3d desktop effects.

If you figure out how to get rid of the tearing make sure you post it. I'd like to use the ATI drivers if I can get past that issue.

Which one is the "Radeon" driver that you mentioned? Since I've tried various drivers the only one that I could get to even remotely play HD video was the one from ati/amd's website (Catalyst 8.5). Sure, I had 3d desktop but I don't care about that for a myth box. I'd be willing to try the driver you mentioned if that will clean up my tearing.

R

It's the regular old open source driver. It should have been the one that was loaded into your system before you loaded the ATI firegl driver. On older versions of X, I had to do some tweeking in the config file to get HD to work, but if you have a current version of X it should be able to ATSC HD without tweeking. H264 is still a problem since the open driver doesn't use the HA capabilities of the video card when decoding H264.

H264 is still a problem since the open driver doesn't use the HA capabilities of the video card when decoding H264.

Does the proprietary one? I didn't think anyone had implemented this yet (please tell me I'm wrong:)).

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I think you're right, but since I can't get the proprietary drivers to work I'm not sure. :o

Anyway, for me, the key to getting decent HD performance from the open source driver was to make sure that the DRI module was loaded and being used. You can run "glxinfo" and verify that it doesn't say "indirect" anywhere in the dump to verify that DRI is running.

I also had to manually set the AGP bus speed to 8x and turn on AGP fast writes. But I assume your newer card isn't AGP so that won't matter to you.

Looks like ATI on Linux will be getting better real soon....

http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/06/19/2113242.shtml

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_evolution&num=3

Looks like ATI on Linux will be getting better real soon....

http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/06/19/2113242.shtml

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_evolution&num=3

If they really want to b&&ch-slap nvidia, they need to be the first give us some HA 264 support. With that, someone can probably get the HD-PVR going well and, then, it's ON!

While AMD's announcement is nothing but a Good Thing for Linux, I don't think hardware GPU acceleration of video is very critical in the big picture. In the short run, x/h264 accel on the GPU would help a lot of people, but within 12 months, everyone on these boards will be able to afford/will have a fast quad core CPU. With multithreaded improvements to mplayer and xine, I think the 4-8 cores we'll all have in 12-18 months will handle all the video chores just fine.

The opengl 3D improvements are welcome, as well as fully supporting mutli-monitors better.

I've gone and installed a Biostar 7200GS (nvidia chipset) card into my myth system to get past the tearing on the ATI card. For now it is working well, but hopefully I can go back to the ATI card soon and leverage the HDMI connection. I think I'll still wait until late summer (after a few more driver releases), right before the next TV season starts, to re-test the ATI drivers and see if I can use my ATI IGP.

Using the nvidia card took me all of about 5 mins to have clean/smooth HD video with no tearing. So for now I'm content with that...

Gigabyte GA-MA78G ATX, w/ onboard ATI HD 3200

Unfortunately, I just bought this board also but am now disappointed that it does not work well with the onboard ATI HD3200 for H264 and HD.

I see that the git head of the RadeonHD driver now offers support for the HD3200 780G

{ “ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics”, RS780, 9610}

I see that the git head of the RadeonHD driver now offers support for the HD3200 780G

{ “ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics”, RS780, 9610}


Please post your feedback on the RadeonHD driver and how well it works for you. I tried the other "ati" open source driver but couldn't get it to work well and so passed on the RadeonHD one as well. I also didn't try the newly released ATI/AMD Catalyst driver 8.6 (released 6/19) and there are some release notes that indicate that it too possibly is working better.

I finally moved the myth box into the living room tonight for some trial runs with my wife (testing WAF). So far, so good.... although with the ATI driver it properly detected my Sony 55" TV and output 1920x1080. However with the nvidia card I had to manually reset the resolution to 1920x1080 within the config tool.. not a biggie.

I did now discover one minor problem not related to video (low/soft sound). But that's not for this tread.

R

I will, however it would probably be a few weeks as I am now ordering the parts for my HTPC. Will start a new thread on that.

There has been released a 8.6 version of the ATI Catalyst driver. Anyone tried it?

http:// ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux/linux-radeon.html (sorry for the space, but i can't post a url as i am a new user).

It has a bugfix for some bandwidth issues at quite high resolutions - don't know if it's the problem mentioned...

# Bandwidth corruption is no longer noticed when setting the desktop resolution to 2048x1536 on systems containing an ATI Radeon HD 3200 series of product. Further details can be found in topic number 737-33499