Radeon 8500 video overlay gone (xawtv and kdetv broken)

[Alex Deucher]

On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 11:42 PM, Robert Braddock
<robert at concordantthought.com> wrote:
> I have a Radeon 8500 video card which I use under linux (debian testing)
> as video-in for my computer to act as my tv monitor.  Sometime since the
> Summer, this has stopped working and I am having no luck finding any
> helpful information by searching.  Most searches just refer to the old
> GATOS project, which hasn't done anything for years, but supposedly has
> been rolled into xorg's drivers, so shouldn't matter.
>
> Now, I know my card uses a "video overlay" which most tv-type programs
> don't seem to care about.  I used to use GATOS's avview to open the
> AV-in window, but that stopped working with X a year or so ago, at which
> point I went to the less reliable but functional xawtv.  That worked for
> a while by itself, but then I needed to run kdetv first, and then xawtv
> (and then kdetv again to shut off the audio).  This was especially odd
> because kdetv didn't actually ever get the actual video, but it would
> reliably get things setup so xawtv could work.  Xawtv still had
> problems, though: it would just go blank if you resized it or made it
> full screen.  The video would come back if you brought up xawtv's menu,
> so the process became: start kdetv, quit it, start xawtv, make it
> fullscreen, right click twice to get the menu and get rid of it again,
> use the video, quit xawtv, start kdetv, and finally quit it.  What a
> mess!  At least it worked, though.
>
> Now, it seems as though my overlay device just isn't there.  Kdetv says
> there's no video device at all and xawtv reports "no usable video port
> found".  Since kdetv and xawtv are unrelated programs, I'm guessing X is
> the one doing something different.
>
> I've looked through the xorg log, and there doesn't seem to be any kind
> of errors to follow up on.  I haven't made any config changes since back
> when it was working.  All that's changed is there have been updates
> installed, but I didn't use the video-in for some months, so I have no
> idea what batch of updates broke things, or why.
>
> This is a current debian testing, kernel 2.6.32-5-686, X.org X Server
> 1.7.7, xawtv 3.95.dfsg.1
>
> Any help tracking down and fixing the problem would be great...  Are
> there any other programs that will connect with the video-in overlay for
> a Radeon 8500?  If this was intentional, are there any recommended
> alternatives (other than new hardware, which isn't an option)?
>

The radeon video input features are not supported with KMS.  If you
want to use them, you will need to disable KMS.  Boot with
radeon.modeset=0 on your kernel command line in grub.  I don't know of
anyone actively working on porting the old video input code to KMS.

Alex

> References:
> - Xorg log
>  http://concordantthought.com/personal/robert/relay/Xorg.0.20110101.log
> - results of "xawtv -v -2"
>  http://concordantthought.com/personal/robert/relay/xawtv-v-2.20110101.log
>
> Thanks for anything,
> Robert
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