[N.Simpson]

Foolishly, I failed to research the XBMC side of things before purchasing my hardware for this project (as it was initially just a NAS) so I'm stuck with the 785G chipset which has RS880 [Radeon HD 4200] graphics. The rest of the HW is a dual core 2.3GHz AMD, 2GB RAM and 6 x 1TB hdds in RAID 5 with the OS on a (relatively) fast USB flash device.

So far I've installed:
Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)
XBMC from the SVN PPA repo
ATI proprietary driver (10.4)
Alsa
Other supplementary packages such as sensors etc

I've managed to get the videos playing back with stereo sound over HDMI although there is a minor amount of tearing present in the video playback. If I switch sound to digital I get no output.

My question is: How much further can I take this hardware setup without buying an NVidia card and simply disabling the onboard ATI?

My goal is multichannel sound over HDMI and no tearing, ideally with hardware offload to keep CPU utilisation low.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[N.Simpson]

Further to the last post, I now have HW video acceleration working and have tear free video with very low CPU usage (typically ~5% for a 720p h264 MKV).

If I could get 5.1 out of the box without breaking anything else then I'd be sorted.

[N.Simpson]

Now I have DTS passthrough on mplayer. Just need to get XBMC to use mplayer with the appropriate video and audio options and I'm set.

[Hailstorm]

Further to the last post, I now have HW video acceleration working and have tear free video with very low CPU usage (typically ~5% for a 720p h264 MKV).

If I could get 5.1 out of the box without breaking anything else then I'd be sorted.

Could you tell me what you have done to get this working? Or did you just/only enabled the basic shaders?!

I also have an ATI HD Card, driver 10.04 with Ubuntu lucid lynx and i also have problems with tearing.. So if you could please explain what you have done it would be most appreciated...

[N.Simpson]

Could you tell me what you have done to get this working? Or did you just/only enabled the basic shaders?!

I also have an ATI HD Card, driver 10.04 with Ubuntu lucid lynx and i also have problems with tearing.. So if you could please explain what you have done it would be most appreciated...

I've yet to get the full HW acceleration in XBMC, at the moment it's only working with mplayer. I'm sure it's possible to define mplayer as an external video player in the XML config files, I just haven't found the time for that yet. I'll write up a quick step by step to do it as soon as I have a spare few minutes. One thing that seemed to make a difference was bumping up some of the 3D settings using amdcccle.

Code:

xinit amdcccle

.

One thing I found was that a clean install of 10.04 worked far better than an upgrade from 9.10. Not sure what method you used but it's certainly worth a try.

[hal2100]

Hello,

I have h264 acceleration with xbmc and ATI hardware, but I have a stuttering playback, where mplayer plays the file fine.

If you found out how to enable the mplayer as videoplayer, I would grateful use this as an interims solution, until the video playback with acceleration is fixed for my hardware

[giantpopples]

Hi !

I also have a Ati card (hd4650) and i'm very interested in hw acceleration under linux..

How did you achieve it (even partially) ? Did you manually compile one of the latest SVN that are not on the official PPA, with VAAPI support ?

I'm running xbmc live (unbuntu 9.11) rev r28256, with Ati drivers 10.4.

BTW I also have the bug with advanced shaders that i can't activate, i must use simple shaders do you have it also ??

Thank you for your help

[K4rn4K]

Hi, I have also an ATI Radeon HD 4200 but inside the XBMC I can see only a flash of various colour when I play something. Even if I play something in VLC I can see all that I want. I don't understand the XBMC problem.

I have installed Ubuntu 10.04 on my HTPC.

I'm new of Linux and I'm trying to use it because many people tell me that is a good OS, but it's very difficult to use all thing like Windows.
I want try again and again for also 1 month before to leave Ubuntu for easiest Windows, please help me.

[giantpopples]

Hi !

In the settings menu, video and playback you should see rendering method set to auto or GLSL, try putting it in ARB (simple shader), then the videos should work.

It's a bug from the recent Ati drivers i think.

[K4rn4K]

done, thanks!

but how can I see if I have the issue explained above ?

[N.Simpson]

Hi !

I also have a Ati card (hd4650) and i'm very interested in hw acceleration under linux..

How did you achieve it (even partially) ? Did you manually compile one of the latest SVN that are not on the official PPA, with VAAPI support ?

I'm running xbmc live (unbuntu 9.11) rev r28256, with Ati drivers 10.4.

BTW I also have the bug with advanced shaders that i can't activate, i must use simple shaders do you have it also ??

Thank you for your help

In order to get hardware acceleration I initially followed the steps list here.

After I had confirmed that VAAPI was working with mplayer, I set up mplayer as an external player using the playercorefactory.xml method described here.

My intention is to use compile a new version from SVN which should have HW acceleration built in so I can ditch the mplayer method and clean up my system somewhat.