Arch Linux

descendent87

Member

Registered: 2009-07-23

Posts: 105

ATI Video output question

I have an ATI HD3200 card, using the open source drivers (so once kernel 2.6.32 moves out of testing I should have 3d) what video output driver will give the best video quality? Most of the videos are 720p MKV's and I'm using auramp, the available output drivers are:
xv -X Video
x11 - X11 Video
xover - X11 Overlay
vdpau - Hardware Decoding
xvmc - X Video Motion Compensation
vesa - VESA Video
dga - [obsolete] Direct Graphics Access
vidix - VIDeo Interface for *niX
xvidix - X11 Vidix
sdl - Simple Directmedia Layer
gl - OpenGL Video
gl2 - OpenGL Video Revised
cvidix - Generic VIDIX
svga - SVGA Video Library
null - Disable Video Output

I used to use the xv output but it stopped working after an update and xvinfo now gives me:

X-Video Extension version 2.2
screen #0
 no adaptors present

So which one will give me the smoothest playback without tearing etc? Thanks

EDIT: Forgot to say I'm currently using X11 which lags and tears quite a bit on HD videos

Last edited by descendent87 (2009-12-28 23:21:23)

sakrag

Member

Registered: 2009-09-14

Posts: 7

Re: ATI Video output question

There usually wont be a big difference in quality for the output drivers, mainly just a difference in performance.  vdpau would give the best performance as it not only uses the video card for rendering, but also for decoding but it is also rather new to mplayer and not very stable.  I also doubt your ATI drivers would support it if they don't support x video.  x11 doesn't provide a lot of the features xvideo does, I never got it to perform hardware scaling properly.  It usually looks decent though.  Maybe poke around in your drivers and find any options for vertical sync to stop the tearing (if you have a dual monitor setup, it is likely that your video drivers can only vertical sync to one of the monitors).  the opengl drivers will provide as good of quality as x video if not better in some cases, but they require 3D hardware acceleration and don't perform nearly as well (they may work without hardware acceleration but it will be software emulated and likely too poor of performance to be usable).  Using video overlays (xover) used to offer the best performance for videos before modern video extensions, but hasn't been commonly used for awhile.  It requires a hardware accelerated overlay context and it is known to cause some issues when used with compositing.  I don't really know what would work best with an ATI card.  I hate ATI myself and have never been able to get any (proprietary or open source) drivers to work correctly with any of my 3 ATI cards.  After my last 2 ATI cards died, I decided to stick with nvidia.  I have a few machines with intel integrated that even work better than my ATI cards did.

Also if your playing a lot of HD, aura's default settings may not be appropriate.  By default Aura is configured with post processing and denoise3d enabled in the filter chain.  This drastically improves the quality of standard definition videos, but for HD videos can be quite performance intensive and sometimes denoise3d may even make HD videos look worse.  I would advise removing those filters, or at least the denoise3d filter, from the filter chain for HD playback.

descendent87

Member

Registered: 2009-07-23

Posts: 105

Re: ATI Video output question

Now that kernel 2.6.32 is in core I have working 3D acceleration so have tried out all the different video outputs and xv still seems to be the best for me. Tearing and lag is now gone almost completely.
Thought vdpau was only for nvidia cards?

daneel971

Member

Registered: 2008-03-28

Posts: 197

Re: ATI Video output question

Thought vdpau was only for nvidia cards?

It is. Right now there's no hardware decoding for ATI cards on Linux.

Last edited by daneel971 (2009-12-30 13:41:57)