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How to Install XBMC PVR Xvba for AMD/Nvidia/Intel GPUs
@fritsch
I found the install experience of Windows 8 reasonably quick - about an hour in total, from a USB stick (I don't have an optical drive yet either!). Fan issues can be problematic, but usually "cool n quiet" or a fan utility can sort them out - but these are usually one time issues and, once fixed, don't intrude on the daily usage experience.
The windows cruft (clutter), gets in the way, certainly, but dammit, the sound works as it should and the video quality is pretty good when using xbmc!

Have you any ray of hope for me that the multichannel sound problems on HDMI will be resolved for ATI-based boards? Standard DVD quality DD 5.1 or DTS is working for me, but none of the uncompressed, high quality audio works. It seems to me to be down to the HDMI handshake support in the ATI fglrx driver not passing proper EDID data back to the sound drivers.
@fat-tony:
Sorry, no idea. I just do xvba.

Update: Btw for such (offline) discussions, you are invited to join #xbmc-xvba :-) have a nice day.
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
Catalyst 12.3 seems to be a very bad driver. Frame Drops and stuff are introduced. If you can stay at 12.2 or even at 11.12 - you won`t miss a thing.

If you want to experiment, you can test the upcoming 12.4 driver: http://developer.amd.com/Downloads/OpenC...sLinux.tgz

This will also be the default driver in Ubuntu 12.04. I did not see major regressions with 12.4 - a bad bottom line with a VC-1 Testfile (Elephant`s Dream) but really fine for an "official" beta driver. It also fixes playback issues on HD5XXX hardware.

if you get a watermark, do:
Code:
echo b2d386c5d67d0189e53d6c848250a42b:8afdbff0e75030bbd50e5cbce37d951887ebb3f1955040ddac1d5bb0b6649212:8ab2e0a1b41b67b9800a59b4b160c649d6e6b6a0e31e63ea800e5be0bb6595138ae4e3a7b44e67b8dc0859b4b660c04fd3b0b7a1e31f63b9870b5ab0bb629519 > /etc/ati/signature

Disclaimer: If you want a reliable and stable setup - please stay with the driver specified within the howto page 1.
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
I have pixel garbage appearing randomly during playback when trying to play 720p Matroska files with h264 level 5.0 video stream. It looks like this:
http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/1741/img0697po.jpg

This happens for most 720p files I find on Internet. For example, try first file from http://www.nyaa.eu/?page=torrentinfo&tid=269814
Here is mediainfo:
http://paste.ubuntu.com/912136/

I have vsync enabled in both X Server (via aticonfig) and XBMC config. If you wish, here are my /etc/X11/xorg.conf and xbmc.log files, as well as guisettings.xml file. As you can see, I tried also enabling display refresh rate matching option.

I have 12.2 ATI driver installed (driver version 11.12 from first post has the same playback problem; I had to upgrade to 12.2 to solve issue with X server hanging up. BTW, 12.3 doesn't work either). Hardware is Zbox AD02 with E350 APU (here is lspci output for GPU).

Any thoughts?
@xyzman:

Yeah, this is expected behaviour, we are really sorry about this. Please read the very first page of this thread - here is the important information:

Code:
Format profile                           : [email protected]
Format settings, CABAC                   : Yes
Format settings, ReFrames                : 16 frames

Lol - the guy who encoded this did not have a single clue on what he is doing, hehe. Btw. to make it also clear on this page: AMD does not support H264 Level@high > 4.1 with 4 reframes. So if you have 4.1 Content with 5 reframes you will see the same shit. Fernetmenta is in "a bit of what can be called" contact with AMD - we hope that we get this fixed, but again: nothing, really nothing we can do without the help of AMD.

Btw. you could really help us, if you post your screenshot and a little description on to:
http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=448

I started this bugreport to make this issue visible for AMD :-)
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
@fritsch:

Thanks, even after reading the first few pages, I never figured that reframes number also matters. The most funny thing is that with Windows-based install of XBMC, I am able to play these videos even on my 5 year-old laptop that has integrated GPU and single-core Celeron 2.2 CPU with no artefacts or slowdown (there, it seems that only the bit rate matters, as long as it is below 2 mbps, any x264 profile and level would play). I really love the way XBMC can be used with bare installation of Ubuntu, though, so I am not planning to give up on idea of Ubuntu+XBMC+XVBA yet. Thanks for continuing the development, and I hope that AMD will notice the problem really soon. By the way, I added my screenshot along with a bit of comment to the bug report (along with CC'ing myself).

Edit: I know that it is kind of obvious, but you might want to put it into the first post that turning off XVBA in Settings-Video might help to solve playback problems for level 5.0+ h264 files with low bitrate. Yes, it somehow defeats the purpose of this build, but most people want simply to watch movies and giving them that hint would be really right thing to do.
Hai, just to inform some debian users.

I finaly got the time to recompile the latest xbmc build, took some time to find my own stupic change which resulted in build errors.
but i found this and here it is. the latest XBMC-XBVA version for debian wheezy.

libcec is also in my apt tree, latest version 1.5.1, which is a nice to have if needed.

Keep up the very good work, and also nice to know, i havent found pixel garbage on my xbmc.
if xyzman can provide me a sample of this problem i'll test it on my xbmc.
running ati 12.2 provide by debian.

( i dont do torrents, so if possible, provide me a link )

Greetings

Louis
@All:

The last few days Fernetmenta and EricV were hunting a sever bug with 12.3 and later catalyst drivers[1]. There were constant drops while watching a video without the xvba code changed in this direction. The good result is, that it is easy to workaround:

If and only if you did manual settings in your amdcccle, please go to:
3D -> More Settings and set the "Wait for vertical refresh" onto the default value, which is "Off unless application specifies" or alternatively to "On, unless application specifices".

Never Ever use the setting "Always on" which is the setting most on the right side, this is the cause of FrameDrops with 12.3++ driver.

And a reminder: Keep Tearfree off.

[1] https://github.com/FernetMenta/xbmc/comm...18c588#-P0
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
@thctlo
I have pixel garbage only with XVBA on - maybe you haven't enabled it, and your CPU is good enough to handle 1080p video decoding.

https://rapidshare.com/files/3967167892/....rar?bin=1 (sorry for file hosting choice and speed, I don't usually share files except via torrents).
Archive password is lueshi
@xyzman and thctlo

As the download link is really small: just try this one:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/55728161/killa.sampla.x264.mkv

should go faster.
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
Quote:Edit: I know that it is kind of obvious, but you might want to put it into the first post that turning off XVBA in Settings-Video might help to solve playback problems for level 5.0+ h264 files with low bitrate. Yes, it somehow defeats the purpose of this build, but most people want simply to watch movies and giving them that hint would be really right thing to do.

Most people use AMD Fusion hardware. There is absolutely no chance to playback these highres, large number of reframes on the cpu. So they would just see "garbage" with correct speed or "8 to 9 fps". Don`t know what is worse :-)

We hope to get better support with a new xvba-sdk (from AMD) soon.

If you build from source, the attached patch should do this automatically.

See: http://paste.ubuntu.com/913031/

I am aware that this patch only matches the codec, so 4.1 with 5 reframes would still be decoded on the gpu - to do this really right, one has to calc the reframes depending on the resolution / macroblocks.

Update: Talked to master - patch won`t work. As we do not have this information that early in the process.
Update2: wsnipex was so kind to update the front page of this thread. It now tells you about the possiblity to disable xvba to playback "garbage file" on the CPU - thx.
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
(2012-04-03, 14:19)fritsch Wrote: @xyzman and thctlo

As the download link is really small: just try this one:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/55728161/killa.sampla.x264.mkv

should go faster.

ok, i did some testing. the seen above in mkv also shows garbled pictures. but i have played the same scene in 1080p mts file, and then it looks nice, running on amd-350 cpu @800Mhz, then is on 1 cpu on 50% load.
at full speed cpu 1600mhz, i only have about 20%cpu load.
( and my server is running also samba, webserver, mailserver, sabnzbd and some other stuff.. )

looks like a wrong codec or to old codec on linux with the killa sample.

any other things i can test?
@thctlo:

That is not a problem with the age of a codec, also the scene does not matter. I can give you tons of files that do not work. The only change is the Codec Level and Reframes used to encode the original material.

Files with 1080p and Refframes >= 5 do not work, cause this is out of spec for h264@high Level 4.1.
You can calc this down for other resolutions.

Formula:
Code:
/* Use fail-safe values (lower ref frames) */
        const unsigned int mbw = pic_param->picture_width_in_mbs_minus1 + 1;
        const unsigned int mbh = (obj_context->picture_height + 15) / 16;
        const unsigned int max_ref_frames = 12288 * 1024 / (mbw * mbh * 384);
        if (max_ref_frames < num_ref_frames)
            num_ref_frames = max_ref_frames;
Source: Gwens xvba-va-driver Code

So, if you really want to know if a video is supported, calc this formula :-)
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
Let`s calc this for 1920x1080 -> the surface is uncut of size 1920x1088

width: 1920 => mbw = 1920 / 16 = 120
height: 1088 => mbh = (1088 + 15) / 16 = 68

=> max_ref_frames = 12288 * 1024 / ( 120 * 68 * 384) = 12582912 / 3133440 = 4

Now for the original file posted:

width: 1280 => mbw = 1280 / 16 = 80
height 728 => mbh = (728 + 15 )/ 16 = 46

=> max_ref_frames = 12582912 / (80 * 46 * 384) = 12582912 / (3680 * 384) = 12582912 / 1413120 = 8

All divisions are integer divisions.

And some common rules. There is no single bluray which is > Level 4.1@high. So encoding a bluray with Level 5.1 High is absolutely foobar. The codec and higher settings can make sense for other streamed Data.
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
I just did an upgrade from 11.0~git20120207.1fef727-0ubuntu1~ppa1~oneiric to 11.0~git20120229.f38655f-0ubuntu1~ppa1~oneiric and playing mkv files no longer produces any audio, any hints on what could be going on? :S

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How to Install XBMC PVR Xvba for AMD/Nvidia/Intel GPUs23