I have spent the better part of the day trying to get XBMC to start on my HTPC, which is an AMD Athlon 64 with a nVidia Quadro FX 3450/4000 (identified as such by KInfoCenter). Let me start by saying that this particular computer (Fujitsu-Siemens Scaleo H) has an integrated video chip (Intel something I think) and when running without the nVidia card installed XBMC does start without problems but is dog-slow, I guess because of lacking hardware acceleration. So when I realized I had the spare nVidia card I installed it and the nouveau open-source drivers. Everything is fine and VLC has no problem playing HD content. But XBMC does not start. Well it starts, shows its splash screen and then displays the background for the theme. But no menus or anything ahow up. And I have to manually kill the binary to get back to the desktop.
So my first question is if XBMC is known to not play ball with the nouveau driver?
Noveau is your problem.
xbmc uses OpenGL for all the Gui stuff - your version of noveau will not support it. vlc does not need OpenGL support to run correctly.
That's good news, in some way I guess. I'll give it another try to install the nvidia driver. But why does it work with the integrated GPU?
Thanks!
Cause intel has better drivers on the OSS side.
if the CPU is: AMD Athlon 64, I very much doubt that the integrated GPU is intel.
maybe pastebin the output of: lscpi
Yes, I finally got it working, sort of. With the proprietary nVidia drivers XBMC starts and the GUI comes up as it should. Now the problem is that XBMC crashes when playing videos. I will have to continue debugging that issue later. Thanks!
the card probably does not support vdpau or the library is missing. pastebin a debug log
Thanks everyone for all the good input. I will get back with more debugging info when I have time to dig into this problem more.
Update: It was in fact VDPAU that caused the crash. I disabled it under settings and now it works just fine. Turns out that my Quadro FX card doesn't support VDPAU. I'll have to get another video card soon
. Thanks again!
I purchased a new video card Wednesday in an effort to minimize fan noise from the computer. Bought an Asus GeForce G210 silent. A very good card for video playback and the heatsink is fanless. First thing I noticed was that XBMC starts fine even with the nouveau driver. So it was my other card that didn't support full OpenGL needed. Secondly I was able to enable VDPAU which reduced the load on the CPU significantly and resulted in the CPU fan not spinning up as fast and thus a much quieter computer overall.
Thanks again for all the great help!