NOTE: Up to date has confirmed only to work on ydl 6.0, i.e my installation.
What is x86-video-spu driver ?
It is SPU accelerated XV ( Xvideo ) driver. Scaling and color conversation ( if I am correct ) is done on SPU. Uses spu-medialib, invented by unsolo ( remember ?
).Why would you use it ?
To get a smooth playback of video ( SD/ some HD ).
How many SPU cores does it use ?
Only 1.
What video applications does it support ?
Mplayer, ffplay ( I don't have any other installed now.
MythTV works with it also. Heard someone was using the driver with VLC. )Can you resize, move, minimize the output window with video ?
Yes !
But don't do it too quickly.Full screen with scaled video ?
Ye.
Again don't change from windowed to full screen and vice versa too often. This will cause some framebuffer bugs. ( temporary )INSTALLING
What you need to have: libspe2, spu-medialib ( we will install it now )
1) Download both archives bellow to you home dir.
2) Extract both archives. ( Sorry, too lazy now to write tar ... -something
)3) Open terminal.
4) Issue the following commands:
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cd
su
cd spu-medialib-ydl
cp libspu-medialib.so.0.100.0 /usr/lib
ln -s /usr/lib/libspu-medialib.so.0.100.0 /usr/lib/libspu-medialib.so.0
ln -s /usr/lib/libspu-medialib.so.0.100.0 /usr/lib/libspu-medialib.so
cd Binaries
cp * /usr/local/bin
exit
cd
su
cd x86-video-spu-ydl
cp spu_fbdev_drv.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers
Warning: Again I warn you that this is the actual step that may cause your Xorg to crash.
5) Now you need to edit your xorg.conf. Remember that it is an important file, so don't mess with it. Making backup would be very clever idea.
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su
nano -w /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Now, look how those two sections must look like:
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Section "Module"
#Load "dbe"
Load "extmod"
Load "fbdevhw"
Load "freetype"
#Load "type1"
#Load "dri"
#Load "glx"
EndSection
NOTE: - I don't get why type1 module is not present on stock ydl 6.2
I have 6.0 and it is there.- Do we need glx ?
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Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
# We couldn't determine the BusID of your video card. So we will use
# the fbdev driver
Option "ShadowFB" "false"
#Option "fbdev" "/dev/fb0"
Driver "spu_fbdev"
#BusID "0:0:0"
EndSection
You have some idea of what you need to edit. Please, don't edit anything else.
To save press CTRL+O and hit enter, to exit - CTRL+X.6) Reboot your system. We have finished.
But how do you turn it on .. like ... ? Don't miss the next stage.Test for Xvideo
To see if you have spu optimized Xvideo driver available, use:
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xvinfo
and look for a mentioning of SPU. If you have "no adopts present", well, you don't have xvideo support.
If you get "xvinfo: command not found", install xvinfo package
NOTE: Up to point of installing x86-video-spu, I guess you should have Savage driver being used.
ACTIVATING
This depends on the player you use. For example ffplay doesn't need any special command. Mplayer doesn't need one also, by default, but if you are unsure, run mplayer -vo xv (video file). I guess, you just need to specify xv driver to use your spu optimization.
PERFOMENCE
Scaling video doesn't have any effect on PPU usage - this is good thing.
ISSUES
- minor video bugs
- SPU thread seems to "freeze" after you have finished watching your video. The spu-top shows spe usage as 16.7 % and it doesn't change. However as soon as you start watching next title, SPU awakens again and you can see that 16.7% changes to 16.0%, 16.5%, etc. Same with pausing. You can get rid of "SPU thread with no task" after watching videos by log out/in. See spu-top.
- Sometimes the system logs out and you have to log in again. This doesn't depend on video in any way. But I don't know what causes it though. However it doesn't occur frequently.
System info.
This is information regarding my system:
YDL 6.0
Glibc 2.5-12
glib 2.12 something
Old spu-medialib
