On Sat, Dec 01 2012, Florian Philipp wrote: > Am 28.07.2012 10:22, schrieb Florian Philipp: >> Am 27.07.2012 22:57, schrieb Michael Mol: >>> On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 4:39 PM, Florian Philipp >>> <li...@binarywings.net> wrote: >>>> Am 27.07.2012 22:22, schrieb Michael Mol: >>>>> On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 4:10 PM, Allan Gottlieb <gottl...@nyu.edu> wrote: >>>>>> I am getting a new laptop. (likely dell 6430). >>>>>> The two graphics options are intel HD 4000 and nvidia NVS 5200M. >>>>>> Dell is as expected suggesting the 5200M. >>>>>> >>>>>> I do not need 3D or fast response. Dell hinted that DVDs might not play >>>>>> with the intel HD 4000. This seems weird to me as the 4000 is supposed >>>>>> to be a big improvement over the 3000 and I can't believe dell or others >>>>>> would have sold laptops that can't play dvds >>>>>> >>>>>> Any comments or experiences? >>>>> >>>>> My Duron 750MHz was able to decode DVDs in realtime. After that, all >>>>> you're doing is blitting (or using xv) the frames to the screen. I >>>>> would be absolutely shocked if the Intel HD 4000 GPU couldn't handle >>>>> that basic of a 2D acceleration function. >>>>> >>>>> Now, DVDs use MPEG2. Blu-Ray uses h.264, which is a much harder beast >>>>> to decode in realtime. It's possible the HD 4000 GPU can't handle >>>>> hardware decode of h.264, but I don't know. I've never looked into it. >>>>> (Software decode of 1080p h.264 on my Phenom 9650 worked somewhat, but >>>>> highly active scenes would cause frame drops.) >>>>> >>>> >>>> I've experienced issues playing DVDs on fullscreen with the OSS radeon >>>> driver. Therefore I'm cautious of assumptions that something works >>>> simply because the input is easy to decode. Upscaling to large displays >>>> with high resolutions can be an issue. >>>> >>>> I'm not saying the Intel driver cannot handle it. I'm just saying you >>>> should try it or look for reports. >>> >>> How high is 'high' resolution? I was upscaling to 1600x1200 using an a >>> Radeon 9600; that card would now be almost ten years old. A bit later, >>> I did the same on a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 using an i845-based Intel >>> graphics card. Here's the line from lspci, as run in May of 2007: >>> >>> 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation >>> 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01) >>> >>> Hardware scaling a 2D image is one of the most trivial >>> hardware-accelerated options GPUs perform. If someone had difficulties >>> upscaling a 480p (roughly what DVDs are) to 1080p at 24 or 33fps, I >>> would be very highly suspicious of a software misconfiguration. That >>> kind of scaling should even be comfortably doable in software on any >>> modern x86-derived processor. (With the plausible exclusion of the >>> Atom CPU) >>> >> >> 1920x1080, on-board Radeon HD 4250. I haven't diagnosed it further >> (except of playing around with mplayer2 options) as it was easier to use >> the closed source driver. >> >> Regards, >> Florian Philipp > > > I realize this thread is pretty stale but since I talked bullshit and > just now realized it, I want to correct myself: > > Since updating the kernel to 3.5 forced me to update the X server beyond > 1.11 which in turn forced me to update ati-drivers to a version that no > longer supported my Radeon HD 4250, I had to look into my issues with > the open source driver. > > It turns out, my problems had two reasons: > - I didn't enable KMS and DRM for radeon in the kernel > - I didn't have x11-drivers/radeon-ucode installed > > Both resulted in a fully functioning X server that > - could run glxgears just fine > - could (with some tuning) render videos in DVD quality with opengl output > - was too slow for videos in any higher resolution > > Regards, > Florian Philipp
Thanks for the response. I should say that I have indeed purchased the laptop with intel graphics and it works fine with DVDs. allan
