Xvideo extension not active with the radeon driver

linux xorg drivers radeon xvideo

35,363

I dealt with this recently; it was a real pain, and unfortunately I don't have notes on exactly what I did.

I saved these two links:

Recent radeon chips don't have dedicated video overlay hardware, they use the texturing support in the 3D core to emulate a video overlay. This means that 3D acceleration needs to be working for the video overlay to work. In my glxinfo I have:

OpenGL vendor string: DRI R300 Project
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R300 (RV515 7145) 20090101  TCL DRI2

If you used the fglrx driver in the past, make sure that any remnants of it are removed (remove any packages found by dpkg -l '*fglrx*' and check for kernel modules in /lib/modules.

I currently have radeon in /etc/modules, as suggested at one of the links above, but I'm not sure if it's strictly necessary. There's nothing interesting in my xorg.conf.

Good luck!

35,363

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' over 1 year
On my computer running Debian squeeze with the radeon driver, the XVideo extension doesn't work (the extension itself is there but the hardware is not supported). xvinfo shows
```
X-Video Extension version 2.2
screen #0
 no adaptors present
```
The adapter is a Gigabyte Radeon X1650, shown by lspci as
```
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV535 [Radeon X1650 Series] (rev 9e)
```
The kernel driver is loaded, as lsmod | grep radeon shows:
```
radeon                574044  1 
ttm                    40018  1 radeon
drm_kms_helper         20065  1 radeon
drm                   142391  3 radeon,ttm,drm_kms_helper
i2c_algo_bit            4225  1 radeon
i2c_core               15712  6 eeprom,radeon,drm_kms_helper,drm,i2c_algo_bit,i2c_i801
```
The required (?) (non-free) firmware also seems to be loaded. From my kernel logs:
```
Mar 14 18:59:33 darkstar kernel: [   11.883832] [drm] Loading R500 Microcode
Mar 14 18:59:33 darkstar kernel: [   11.883834] platform radeon_cp.0: firmware: requesting radeon/R520_cp.bin
```
XVideo worked under Debian lenny. After upgrading to squeeze (Linux kernel: 2.6.32-5-vserver-amd64; xserver-xorg-video-ati 6.13.1-2+squeeze1) it doesn't. How do I get it back?

(link to the X server logs)
- tshepang about 13 years
  
  Maybe see if removing the free driver (xserver-xorg-video-ati) and the drivers it depends on works.
- Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' about 13 years
  
  @Tshepang: I am using the stock Debian kernel, so it has the required pieces (and as I show the radeon module is loaded). How is removing the driver supposed to help?
- tshepang about 13 years
  
  @Gilles: This is a guess, but maybe when it's present, it's used, instead of the proprietary one.
- Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' about 13 years
  
  @Tshepang: Why do you even mention the proprietary driver? I have the free one installed, I want to use the free one, it worked before (and I never got the proprietary one to start without a hard freeze).
- tshepang about 13 years
  
  @Gilles: You mentioning it led me to think it's the one you wanted to use. Sorry.
- XTL about 13 years
  
  Does xdpyinfo | grep -i video show the extension as loaded?
- XTL about 13 years
  
  And does grep -i xvideo /var/log/Xorg.0.log return anything interesting?
- XTL about 13 years
  
  I can't seem to remove the last comment, but I noticed the log and it seems to say the extension is loaded.
- Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' about 13 years
  
  @XTL: The extension is loaded, otherwise xvinfo would print a different message (xvinfo: No X-Video Extension on :0).
- tshepang about 13 years
  
  You considered filing a bug?
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' about 13 years

“The following is using the fglrx ATI proprietary drivers and ONLY applies to these drivers.” So it's irrelevant for this question, I'm using the open source radeon driver (which worked under lenny).
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' about 13 years

As far as I can tell, the problems mentioned in the two links you cite were solved by the time squeeze was released. I already have radeon in /etc/modules, it is loaded with modeset=1, I have radeon kernel modesetting enabled in my kernel logs and Loading extension DRI2 (but no other occurrence of DRI2) in my X logs. However glxinfo shows Mesa X11 as the renderer, not Mesa DRI; I have libgl1-mesa-swx11 installed, not libgl1-mesa-glx.
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' about 13 years

After removing the fglrx-glx and fglrx-driver packages (which were supposedly not used, I saw no trace in any log) and installing libgl1-mesa-glx in place of libgl1-mesa-swx11, XVideo works. Thank you!