Xvideo extension not active with the radeon driver

Question

On my computer running Debian squeeze with the radeon driver, the XVideo extension doesn't work (the extension itself is there but the hardware is not supported). xvinfo shows

X-Video Extension version 2.2
screen #0
 no adaptors present

The adapter is a Gigabyte Radeon X1650, shown by lspci as

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV535 [Radeon X1650 Series] (rev 9e)

The kernel driver is loaded, as lsmod | grep radeon shows:

radeon                574044  1 
ttm                    40018  1 radeon
drm_kms_helper         20065  1 radeon
drm                   142391  3 radeon,ttm,drm_kms_helper
i2c_algo_bit            4225  1 radeon
i2c_core               15712  6 eeprom,radeon,drm_kms_helper,drm,i2c_algo_bit,i2c_i801

The required (?) (non-free) firmware also seems to be loaded. From my kernel logs:

Mar 14 18:59:33 darkstar kernel: [   11.883832] [drm] Loading R500 Microcode
Mar 14 18:59:33 darkstar kernel: [   11.883834] platform radeon_cp.0: firmware: requesting radeon/R520_cp.bin

XVideo worked under Debian lenny. After upgrading to squeeze (Linux kernel: 2.6.32-5-vserver-amd64; xserver-xorg-video-ati 6.13.1-2+squeeze1) it doesn't. How do I get it back?

(link to the X server logs)

Maybe see if removing the free driver (`xserver-xorg-video-ati`) and the drivers it depends on works. — tshepang, Mar 16 '11 at 06:38
Have a look at your kernel config (`/boot/config-2.6.32...`) to see if has [all of these](http://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo#Configuringthekernel). — tshepang, Mar 16 '11 at 06:44
@Tshepang: I am using the stock Debian kernel, so it has the required pieces (and as I show the `radeon` module is loaded). How is removing the driver supposed to help? — Gilles 'SO- stop being evil', Mar 16 '11 at 08:24
@Gilles: This is a guess, but maybe when it's present, it's used, instead of the proprietary one. — tshepang, Mar 16 '11 at 08:57
@Tshepang: Why do you even mention the proprietary driver? I have the free one installed, I want to use the free one, it worked before (and I never got the proprietary one to start without a hard freeze). — Gilles 'SO- stop being evil', Mar 16 '11 at 19:29
@Gilles: You mentioning it led me to think it's the one you wanted to use. Sorry. — tshepang, Mar 16 '11 at 20:56
And does grep -i xvideo /var/log/Xorg.0.log return anything interesting? — XTL, Mar 17 '11 at 18:19
I can't seem to remove the last comment, but I noticed the log and it seems to say the extension is loaded. — XTL, Mar 17 '11 at 18:26
@XTL: The extension is loaded, otherwise `xvinfo` would print a different message (`xvinfo: No X-Video Extension on :0`). — Gilles 'SO- stop being evil', Mar 17 '11 at 18:45

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 21 '11 at 15:54

3

I dealt with this recently; it was a real pain, and unfortunately I don't have notes on exactly what I did.

I saved these two links:

Recent radeon chips don't have dedicated video overlay hardware, they use the texturing support in the 3D core to emulate a video overlay. This means that 3D acceleration needs to be working for the video overlay to work. In my glxinfo I have:

OpenGL vendor string: DRI R300 Project
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R300 (RV515 7145) 20090101  TCL DRI2

If you used the fglrx driver in the past, make sure that any remnants of it are removed (remove any packages found by dpkg -l '*fglrx*' and check for kernel modules in /lib/modules.

I currently have radeon in /etc/modules, as suggested at one of the links above, but I'm not sure if it's strictly necessary. There's nothing interesting in my xorg.conf.

Good luck!

answered Mar 21 '11 at 15:54

Andy

2,839
23
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As far as I can tell, the problems mentioned in the two links you cite were solved by the time squeeze was released. I already have `radeon` in `/etc/modules`, it is loaded with `modeset=1`, I have `radeon kernel modesetting enabled` in my kernel logs and `Loading extension DRI2` (but no other occurrence of `DRI2`) in my X logs. However `glxinfo` shows `Mesa X11` as the renderer, not `Mesa DRI`; I have `libgl1-mesa-swx11` installed, not `libgl1-mesa-glx`. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Mar 24 '11 at 22:23
There is also some info at http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonBuildHowTo. libgl1-mesa-swx11 is probably not right. Do you have anything in the log for "textured video" or plain "dri"? – Andy Mar 25 '11 at 00:34
After removing the `fglrx-glx` and `fglrx-driver` packages (which were supposedly not used, I saw no trace in any log) and **installing `libgl1-mesa-glx` in place of `libgl1-mesa-swx11`**, XVideo works. Thank you! – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Mar 25 '11 at 22:46

score -2 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 18 '11 at 06:46

-2

I'm not sure if this will help, but I found this post:

http://swinky-linuxblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/xvinfo-no-adaptors-present-and-curious.html

Where the author seems to have fixed the problem, and several of the commenters claim it fixed it for them as well.

answered Mar 18 '11 at 06:46

J. Taylor

2,665
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“The following is using the fglrx ATI proprietary drivers and ONLY applies to these drivers.” So it's irrelevant for this question, I'm using the open source `radeon` driver (which worked under lenny). – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Mar 18 '11 at 21:36

Xvideo extension not active with the radeon driver

2 Answers2