fglrx, xorg, mplayer, vo=xv occaisonally X goes to 100%

pdr · l33t Joined: 20 Mar 2004 Posts: 618

I believe the only recent update I had was ati-drivers; not the latest ~x86 - I had to package.mask that because of bugs - but the one before it; I had not ~x86 ati-drivers before, so I was at like .511 and went to .514 (whatever was before that .542 problem child).

This is in a htpc. Before the updates everything ran fine on an AMD LE-1650 in 32-bit. Afterward occaisonally xorg would peg - a ssh session with top would not respond for a few seconds and audio would tightly loop; finally it would "break free" (it was very reminiscent of the needle skipping on vinyl) - at which time the ssh top would now refresh and show X using lots of CPU% for one update - and a few minutes later would do it again.

Tried revdep-rebuild, and even went so far as to emerge -e world. Finally I tried vo=x11 in my .mplayer/config file and a 20 minute tv show test ran clean with X staying at about 15% CPU. With vo=xv I also had the events/0 job using significant CPU% in top, did not notice with the vo=x11 test. And finally AFTER the problem started I finally explicitly added INPUT_DEVICES="keyboard mouse evdev" to /etc/make.conf (before the emerge -e world).

Anybody else see any symptoms like these? I assume that if I want to stay with vo=xv I should either try downgrading ati-drivers and/or wait for another version to come out? As long as all my movies and TV episodes run OK I don't have a problem with using vo=x11 - I just assumed that xv was more efficient (in htpc parlance: ran cooler)...

defenderBG · l33t Joined: 20 Jun 2006 Posts: 817

I bet X is not using the graphic card. Try:
cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep EE
eselect opengl list
glxinfo

pdr · l33t Joined: 20 Mar 2004 Posts: 618

Nope - fglrx is loading. It does warn that it is an "unknown 3rd party board" (780g IGP), but chipset is supported. Otherwise it only has a bunch of warnings that "AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0xHH" messages, which I've seen before on low-end video chips. I did have a bunch of fonts missing (had copied the FONTPATHs from my workstation), but I went ahead and installed them.

glxinfo is showing lots of stuff, including direct rendering: Yes. And lots of visuals - just not the ones it warns about in the log.

defenderBG · l33t Joined: 20 Jun 2006 Posts: 817

hm... try starting X as root and see if when using mplayer -vo xv you will expirience the same problem. If yes => permitions not set right. If no => try reemerging x11-libs/libXv x11-libs/libXxf86vm x11-libs/libXext media-video/mplayer

pdr · l33t Joined: 20 Mar 2004 Posts: 618

Huh? Everything is playing - just the occaisonal hangup - so I cannot see it being a permission problem. And I did a emerge -e world - that rebuilds ALL the packages. Previously I had manually one-shot'd mplayer and ffmpeg; when it still had problems I decided to waste a few hours and do the empty-tree emerge.

This htpc setup has been fine for at least the last 4 kernels (I keep 3 previous and I had to unmerge one when the last kernel came out, so it's been at least 4 kernels now). But if no one else is seeing symptoms like this then I guess it is a configuration problem (or I'm using some config things that have a problem with the new ati-drivers but no one else is using them)...

theDOC_23 · Posted: Sat Nov 29, 2008 2:07 pm Post subject:

xv sucks on the 780g, you get video tearing because there is no vsync for xv and the image is too bright. try using vo=gl:yuv=4 and set "wait for vertical refresh" to "always on" in amdcccle. unfortunately gl uses a bit more cpu time than xv.

pdr · l33t Joined: 20 Mar 2004 Posts: 618

vo=x11 is working, and I have no problem with the visual quality, so I will stick with it until I can revert to vo=xv