SOLVED: .43 and video performances on VIA EPIA

[archived]

Hi all

after .43 upgrade i noticed a consistent worsening of video performances on my VIA EPIA MD.

With releases up to .42 I was able to play dvd and divx with decent performances, with only occasional video stuttering.
Top showed anyway a high CPU load related to Xine_Plugin (around 75%) and in this situation it was not rare that the overall CPU load was hitting 100% (causing then some video stuttering).

In past release i was using some custom scritp to launch dvd an divx, i.e. bypassing Xine_Plugin and this allowed to have better performance and basically avoid any stuttering.

So my opinion was that Xine_Plugin had something strange, that in case of limited horse power (my MD has a Nehemiah 1Ghz, that is not a rocket but nevertheless more that enough to play videos) could cause those issues.

Now in my opinion the problem is a bit different. Even when I launch xine with my own scripts it turns out that xine cannot start any hardware acceleration except xshm, while up to .42 I was able to start it with -V xv option. In this situation xine jumps to 90% CPU load and all of my video playback are a nightmare.

Looking at xorg.conf it looks like X is using vesa driver, while on PlutoAdmin this MD is configured to have unichrome video card.

If my deduction is correct, I suppose that vesa driver cannot handle video hardware acceleration of unichrome chipset, and for this reason xine is consuming that much of CPU.

Questions are:

1. are actually my deductions correct?
2. if yes, how can I force my MD to use video driver that are set in PlutoAdmin ?
3 if not, can anyone give me some hint to get thru this issue? May this issue have something to do with recent recompiling of xorg that has been made for .43?

TIA
Marco

[archived]

a brief update:

digging a bit deeper I've found that running xine-check on my MD I get warning messages saying that my X server does not support YV12 overlays and Xvideo.

That's sounds like a confirmation on my idea that there something wrong with xorg or its configuration on my MD.

I get also another interesting message, saying that there are multiple occurence of xiine executable (one in /usr/bin and another in /usr/X11R6/bin). Which is the correct one?

I find also a message saying that no xine-config is installed and no plugin directory defined.
May also this have a role in my performance problems?

TIA
Marco

[archived]

...answeryng to my own questions, but it's OK when a solution is found.

After some researches I realized that probably the proper video drivers were missing on my md.

So I ssh-ed to my MD, and performed a:

Code: [Select]


apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-via


Then rebooted MD and started Chronicles of Narnia, that is currently playing taking 15% of CPU (compared to 95% as before).

I was convinced that drivers should have been installed at MD configuration time, but probably I'm wrong.

It may be useful for the future to make clear whether specific drivers should be installed by hand or if htey should be installed automatically according to PlutoAdmin settings.

Regards
Marco

[archived]

Thanks for this it has dramatically improved the performance of one of my MD's

[archived]

the drivers that xine uses should always be the ones from pluto-admin.
my guess is that you have unichrome drivers working then on an upgrade the  drivers changed to xv by themselves and pluto-admin had no way how to update that page