ATI HDMI, Good news coming over the hill?

StaticPhilly · 2012-01-17 15:04:31

Since gnome 3 was here iv been having a battle with my ati card (evergreen) and hdmi, this has been going on for 8 month or so, so as you can imagine im rather fed up

heres the situation, this box is connected to the tv in the front room.
a) using the opensource driver (xf86-video-ati) the hdmi video works like a charm, no problems, but... the hdmi audio never has worked.
This for me was a big pain, cant listen to music, watch movies (or more to the point listen) etc etc
b) using the catalyst driver (amd's proprietary driver) we went from a unusable gnome shell (unless we used fallback) using 11.10 and 11.11 then comes along 11.12, ok so we now have a pretty gnome shell... but, unless we tell xserver not to use xv then playing videos in most applications will crash xserver on default settings
The second problem with this driver is gnome-shell likes to segfault randomly when you hover over the parts of the shell, if it crashes twice in say 10 seconds it will log you out. (i experanced this with x110 as well as x111)

ok the good news!
iv been watching http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature for a while, they have now inplanted hdmi audio for evergreen and n.islands cards!

ok the bad news....
reading the notes next to hdmi audio it says...

Requires loading radeon with the audio parameter set to 1 (e.g., add radeon.audio=1 on the kernel command line in grub). Exergreen support required kernel 3.3 or newer.

ok so we need kernel 3.3... which dosnt exist... so i got all excited and then bang... grr... so what i done was just incase (grabbing the little bit of hope left) compiled the latest version of xf86-video-ati and the latest version of kernel (3.2.x) and tryed to get it to work, nothing....

so overrall,
it looks like there is hope over the hill for the opensource driver and hdmi with audio but the question is how long will it take, another couple of month at least imo but at least its looking up.

unfortunately iv decided to give up on this now, iv decided to get an nvidia card that will be here in about 2 hours, so why the hell did i post this? well my thoughts are im sure i will not be the only person with hdmi audio problems.

anyway sorry for rambling, just thought id share and see what everyones thoughts are.

cheers,
Phil

crondog · 2012-01-18 08:16:58

StaticPhilly,

Here is a link to the patches http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/d … 17233.html for evergreen hdmi. I havent tested these myself since i switched over to the catalyst drivers just before this came out. Just make sure you use the correct ones as there are some changes in the mailing list

Lone_Wolf · 2012-01-19 20:30:56

StaticPhilly wrote:

Since gnome 3 was here iv been having a battle with my ati card (evergreen) and hdmi, this has been going on for 8 month or so, so as you can imagine im rather fed up
<snip>
unfortunately iv decided to give up on this now, iv decided to get an nvidia card that will be here in about 2 hours, so why the hell did i post this? well my thoughts are im sure i will not be the only person with hdmi audio problems.
anyway sorry for rambling, just thought id share and see what everyones thoughts are.
cheers,
Phil

That basically means you are buying/installing another videocard because gnome developers are unable to use your ati card correctly ?

StaticPhilly · 2012-01-21 13:38:39

Lone_Wolf wrote:

That basically means you are buying/installing another videocard because gnome developers are unable to use your ati card correctly ?

I wouldnt say the gnome devs are all to blame, but yes i can see your point.

in past:
blame gnome for not testing gnome3 with amd drivers before release (yes you can argue that they cant test all hardware, but, amd, nvidia and intel are the 3 main cards) and then passing the blame to amd.

at present:
blame amd for the xvideo bug (why? because its not just in gnome)
blame amd for the segfaualt (why? because this segfault only started when they updated to 11.12)

all in all, i blame both, yes gnome started it but looks like amd want to finish it

cheers,
Phil

Last edited by StaticPhilly (2012-01-21 13:39:01)

lamnk · 2012-01-21 20:11:09

According to kernel.org, 3.3-rc1 is mainline now. I will try and report back if HDMI audio work

EDIT: work painlessly, not really plug and play but I just have to plug the cable in and then run xrandr.

Download precompiled 3.3 kernel from this AUR linux-mainline package

Last edited by lamnk (2012-01-21 21:11:06)

murr4y · 2012-01-26 16:08:19

I've read somewhere that the hdmi output quality with the xf86 driver is not as good as with the catalyst driver. (ah found it: HERE)
Can your confirm that?
I wasn't too impressed when I hooked up my computer to the HD-TV. But I couldn't set the 1080p output to HD-ready resolution on my TV anyway, so I couldn't judge it properly I guess.
I'd really like to dump my old media player and use XBMC instead (connecting PC to tv).

Last edited by murr4y (2012-01-26 16:09:09)

lamnk · 2012-01-29 03:50:50

Personally I find no difference in TV output quality between radeon and catalyst drivers.

nawitus · 2012-02-04 19:38:10

My solution is to simply use S/PDIF and never use the HDMI audio. Of course, you need an additional cable amplifier (if you use one).

lamnk · 2012-02-06 12:53:39

Yeah, if your computer is a PC or HTPC then additional cables are another solution. However I have only one netbook, thus the less cable the merrier. Having to constantly plug the cables in and out is really a hassle.

Sometime I wish my TV could drive my laptop like the Apple Thunderbolt Display. One (technically two) cable for power, video, network ...

Arch Linux

#1 2012-01-17 15:04:31

ATI HDMI, Good news coming over the hill?

#2 2012-01-18 08:16:58

Re: ATI HDMI, Good news coming over the hill?

#3 2012-01-19 20:30:56

Re: ATI HDMI, Good news coming over the hill?

#4 2012-01-21 13:38:39

Re: ATI HDMI, Good news coming over the hill?

#5 2012-01-21 20:11:09

Re: ATI HDMI, Good news coming over the hill?

#6 2012-01-26 16:08:19

Re: ATI HDMI, Good news coming over the hill?

#7 2012-01-29 03:50:50

Re: ATI HDMI, Good news coming over the hill?

#8 2012-02-04 19:38:10

Re: ATI HDMI, Good news coming over the hill?

#9 2012-02-06 12:53:39

Re: ATI HDMI, Good news coming over the hill?

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