Arch Linux

jarda-wien

Member

Registered: 2008-03-13

Posts: 104

ATI+KMS vs. mplayer

Yesterday I upgraded the kernel, read the wiki and enabled an early start KMS on my Thinkpad T41. Everything went fine!!! Bravo for that.
My question is rather a rhetoric one:
What is it about KMS that is better than the old framebuffer?

e.g. During boot, there is a phase that lasts about 1s, in which the resolution is small. After that obviously KMS loads it's modules and switches to a higher resolution. Now with the old behaviour (vga=792 in grub), the framebuffer didn't take that second to load up....

More importantly thou, mplayer in the console stopped working...

Maybe I am doing something wrong or maybe this is just because KMS is said to be "experimental". But still I would like to see what others think about that.

Army

Member

Registered: 2007-12-07

Posts: 1,784

Re: ATI+KMS vs. mplayer

More importantly thou, mplayer in the console stopped working...

Oh, I haven't tried that yet. Did you do this by -vo fbdev2 ? I sometimes watch movies this way on my laptop when it's on battery, needs less power without x. Have to find out how this works with kms!

jarda-wien

Member

Registered: 2008-03-13

Posts: 104

Re: ATI+KMS vs. mplayer

Well it did work just invoking mplayer somevideo.mkv (without the -vo fbdev2...).
If I understand this correctly, there is no framebuffer now, so there is no fbdev either:|

blazzter

Member

Registered: 2009-03-25

Posts: 16

Re: ATI+KMS vs. mplayer

for me:      dmesg|egrep "drm|radeon"
gives:

...
[drm] fb depth is 24
[drm]    pitch is 5120
[drm] LVDS-7: set mode 1280x800 c
fb0: radeondrmfb frame buffer device
[drm] radeon: kernel modesetting successfully initialized.
[drm] Initialized radeon 2.0.0 20080528 for 0000:01:05.0 on minor 0

but    mplayer -vo radeondrmfb   gives error opening /initial... selected -vo device   and nothing else
Maybe mplayer can be compilled against that framebuffer?