poor video playback performace with radeon

[Taneli Vähäkangas]

Hello. Thanks for your prompt reply.

On Tue, Aug 09, 2011 at 08:35:27AM +0200, Johannes Truschnigg wrote:
> Given the system specs below, I'm afraid this is nothing out of the
> ordinary. H.264 in 1080p generally is quite demanding to decode, and
> your somewhat dated CPU just might not be up to the task.

I'd like to use the GPU, it should be better suited for the task,
right?

> You should try to get your hands onto a build of mplayer with the
> multithreading decoding features of ffmpeg enabled. I'm not sure that
> will yield real-time decoding of your video source, but it should
> improve performance a bit nonetheless.

I'll take a look.

> I distantly recall ATI/AMD implementing some GPU video decode
> acceleration API in their proprietary BLOB drivers, but I'm not sure how
> (or if, with your card) you can use that.

I'll check out -- but I prefer open source.

> The free drivers don't support video decoding with GPU hardware
> assistance yet.

This, and this:

> have to get a beefier machine if you don't want to wait for shader-based
> video decoding (or UVD) support in the free drivers.

How much effort is that? How can I help? Where do I start? I'm no
stranger to driver development (in kernel), but have never worked
with X.org (or even XFree86) code.

Cheers,

	Taneli