On Sun, Apr 14, 2002 at 12:48:25PM -0500, Billy Biggs wrote:
>
> You can usually send MPEG1 too, you can't send them uncompressed
> frames. So you can't like, composite your cool OSD on top of your
> DVD-Video and send that out.
Bah! I knew there would be a reason. So none of the dxr[2|3] cards
support an "uncompressed overlay" of any sorts for doing an OSD?
> The point is I don't know if there's anything to block you right now.
> You mentioned that mplayer uses a buffering mode, so I guess I should
> read their code, maybe this is already done. I was under the
> impression they just used the fbcon API after the second head was setup.
Check out mga_vid.o (the kernel part of the solution) and the [x]mga
-vo.
> You can't just provide an API that blocks you either, I mean, you need
> more timing information for audio, or if you're playing live TV you may
> want to deal with underruns differently (or try and adjust the output
> clock to match the input).
I hear ya. I was being simplistic. But that is what has gotten us
into this mess in the first place. :-)
> Are you sure about ATI not giving out documentation?
Fairly. Not to enable TV-Out on Radeons anyway. It's all got to do
with their licensing of CSS so that they can play DVDs I would
imagine. My guess is that RIAA (who is really at the root of all this
evil after-all) pulled an anti-trust kind of move and said to ATI, "If
you want to license the CSS 'stuff' you have to prevent copying of
DVDs" which ATI did with Macrovision which could be disabled with the
TV-Out specs and ATI was forced into closing out the TV-Out ability of
the code except for software which they can control.
> Where did you
> hear that?
Well, the Mplayer video.html DOC says this:
2.3.1.A.2. ATI cards
A few word about ATI's TV-out:
Currently ATI doesn't want to support any of its TV-out chips under
Linux. Below is official answer from ATI Inc.:
> Hello!
>
> On your pages you wrote that you support linux developers.
> Currently I participate with mplayer project (www.mplayerhq.hu)
> I'm interesting with enabling TV-out on Radeon VE chips during
> movie playback. I would be glad to add this feature to radeonfb driver
> (which can be found in CVS tree of mplayer project at main/drivers/radeon).
> Do I have a chance to get any official technical documenation?
We will not provide TV out related documents due to macrovision concerns.
Also mpeg2 decoding is something that we MAY consider in the future but not
at this current time. This is again due to proprietary and 3rd party
> I know lots of people who have aquired docs from ATI for
> their graphics chips...
Yes, indeed in the past that was not true (hence the ATI with the big
circle/slash that was on the v4l page for a while) then ATI started
playing all nice and now it seems that while their intentions might be
well positioned, RIAA have tied their hands.
I did have TV-Out working on my Radeon with a Gatos release at one
point in the past but was not very happy with the results (green bar
down the right, etc.) so pulled it out for my G400. Maybe I will try
putting my Radeon back in and using XF86 with Gatos again and see how
smooth video is with MPlayer and Vidix again.
b.
--
Brian J. Murrell
Attachment:
pgpRDBdlLNLBE.pgp
Description: PGP signature
