Chris Brennan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Fri, 15 Feb 2008 23:07:28 -0500:
> xawtv gives me a window and when I right click, I can choose what format > and region and all that jazz, but I get no picture. > > tvtime produces the following error: [reformatted] > *** tvtime requires hardware YUY2 overlay support from your > video card driver. [...] If unsure, please check with your > distribution to see if your *** X driver supports > hardware overlay surfaces. I don't touch proprietaryware so talk to someone else about that or try the newest free drivers, which are supposed to support the R3xx series chips including 3D. However, I can say this based on video behavior in general (and it worked the same on MSWormOS 98, with Nvidia hardware when I first switched to Linux, and now with the Radeon R200 series stuff I'm running now as it was the newest with freedomare 3D support for awhile, so this would appear to be platform independent)... When the overlay is working properly, particularly when there's nothing playing, it should be quite apparent it's not a standard window. The overlay will normally be blue-screen (tho I've rarely seen pink or orange or red, but always solid color), and doesn't obey normal window rules (no transparency, often no resizing, etc), as it's an "overlay". Overlays are definitely a feature of the hardware. Most video cards will have it, but some won't have the functionality exposed in the drivers. If you don't have it, anything that must use it, no other choice, will be broken on your system. Fortunately, while it tends to be the lowest CPU most efficient method of playing video, most software video players and the like have other choices as well. The overlay option is Xv, but most software can use one or more of standard surface mapping, OpenGL, xshm (generally more efficient than standard surface mapping, less than Xv), or SDL video rendering. (Of course SDL can in turn use OpenGL and a couple others.) Unfortunately, a lot (perhaps most?) TV capture hardware must use the overlay, no other choice for it. That's reasonable as it's definitely most efficient and least complicated for the hardware to access, but if your video hardware or drivers don't support it, your SOL. So what I'd suggest is confirming that your video hardware and drivers support it, then trying with something like kaffeine or kmplayer (the video players I use). If you can get the overlay working there, then you at least know it's working before you try to get the TV capture hardware going. As for your video drivers, as I said, the R3xx chip family is supposed to be supported with the newest open drivers, but I don't believe the 3D at least is fully stable, yet. Hmm... just checked, they've updated, it now says "quite stable", but that's still not just "stable". This is with pre-release xf86-video-ati (Gentoo package name) 6.7.19x (upstream version) with Mesa 7.0.x. Gentoo's packages, mesa-7.0.2 is ~arch (and I have it merged here), xf86- video-ati-6.7.197 is ~arch but hard-masked: # Joshua Baergen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (27 Mar 2007) # Release candidate ATI driver So you can try unmasking it and see how it goes if you want. As I said, upstream calls it "quite stable" now, so it should work, tho there'll be further changes as it continues to develop and fully stabilize. Some Radeon links from the x.org and dri.freedesktop.org wikis. The first links the second but the link tends to get lost on the page, so I put it here, too. The second is a portal page, with a bunch of links to other resources, some of which look quite encouraging. http://www.x.org/wiki/radeon?highlight=%28radeon%29 http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/R300_Portal I'm /guessing/ that with the free drivers, you'll have overlay support without much problem. If not, at least with them you'll be able to get community support, something that's not so easy to get (or give) when the driver's a not so well supported black-box. Of course, you can check the documentation and/or ask and see. (As I said, I don't do proprietary, but if I were to do so, I'd certainly do NVidia, as at least they have decent Linux support even if it is proprietary. ATI Linux support of their closed drivers has always been patchy at best, and of course the community can't support them as they are closed. At least ATI's working with the community on open drivers now as you're probably aware, but it's going to be a good year before stable drivers come out of that project.) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- [email protected] mailing list
