Radeon 8500 video overlay gone (xawtv and kdetv broken)

[Robert Braddock]

On Sun, Jan 02, 2011 at 07:45:16PM -0500, Alex Deucher wrote:
> 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.

Partial success.  With that boot option, the device is there again
(which is weird, because I had actually tried something else that was
supposed to disable the KMS, and there wasn't any change that way), but
it still doesn't actually work properly.

Kdetv just shows some red lines (no surprise -- that's as much as it did
before), and even though xawtv can put up the video, it will only show
the video through a viewport sized like its default initial window
(which is way too small).  If I resize or fullscreen the window, the
image is scaled, but everything outside that default initial window size
and position is black.  I say "default initial window" because even if I
use a command line option to fullscreen it from the start, the visible
portion is still that same tiny "window".  I'd really like to get it
back to the workable state it was in before where I could at least
resize it (even if I did have to bring up and close the menu to get it
to redraw after resizing).

I've tried various -this and -nothis options with no apparent change.

> I don't know of anyone actively working on porting the old video input
> code to KMS.

Can we get a warning message at least?  That would have really helped,
especially if I'd still gotten a warning when the KMS was supposed to
have been disabled.  I'd have known to try something else along that
line, at least.

Is there any way to get a /dev/video0 from this kind of card/device?  I
was optimistic that when X rolled the GATOS project in, the video-in
support would finally be something resembling stable (I've completely
given up on capture or tv-tuner functionality), but it looks like it's
as tenouous and broken-by-default as ever.

If the video-in code were "ported to KMS" would it work better?  I've
never written video/driver code or worked inside of X, but I can do C.
If this is just cosmetic stuff and something says what needs to be done,
I could maybe do something (although X is definitely in the class of
things I hoped never to be compiling from source again).

But if X is just going to write the feature off anyway, I'd rather see
it work through /dev/video so that I could at least use a different
viewer program than xawtv.

--
Robert