Solved 9.2-RELEASE and Intel-KMS, poor video playback [SOLVED]

I managed to get X.org working with the new Intel-KMS driver. Everything else seem to work just fine, except that watching Full-HD 1080p h.264 videos yields poor performance. VLC renders frames many seconds too late and complains about slow CPU. I tried all possible rendering methods including X11, Xv, GLX, SDL and OpenGL (experimental).

My rig is Acer Aspire 5742g with Optimus, Intel HD 3xxx and nVidia GT540M. I managed to disable the discrete nVidia chip as it would not work anyways because of how the chip is wired.

Currently the rig is bricked. It had a modified BIOS which worked just fine before I tried to disable Hyper Threading, which now makes the BIOS fail bootstrapping. Most likely the legacy BIOS code is waiting for HT cores to initialize, which never happens as HT is disabled ...

So, I am asking whether other people have video playback working with Optimus setup and/or Intel HD3xxx chips?

NOTE: I will visit a friend who can replace the BIOS SPI ROM chip on the mobo to get the device working again during the 2nd week of january. After that I can build a kernel with required debugging tools and start gathering useful logs.

NOTE2: Once the rig is operational, I will try OpenBSD and Gentoo GNU/Linux on it too. If their drivers work better then problem must be with the FreeBSD Intel-KMS implementation.

When I get more information I will post updates on this thread.
 
Re: 9.2-RELEASE and Intel-KMS, bad video playback performanc

If you use Intel KMS then (hopefully) GPU video decoding via VAAPI should work, i.e. multimedia/libva-intel-driver together with a video player built to support it, like vlc built with the VAAPI knob enabled. (and hardware accelerated video decoding enabled in Tools->Prefs->Input&Codecs in case of vlc.)

HTH, :)
Juergen
 
Re: 9.2-RELEASE and Intel-KMS, bad video playback performanc

nox@ said:
If you use Intel KMS then (hopefully) GPU video decoding via VAAPI should work, i.e. multimedia/libva-intel-driver together with a video player built to support it, like vlc built with the VAAPI knob enabled. (and hardware accelerated video decoding enabled in Tools->Prefs->Input&Codecs in case of vlc.)

HTH, :)
Juergen

Thanks, I did not know I had to install the multimedia/libva-intel-driver separately, will try using it later for sure. But I have a hunch that problem is not in decoding. My CPU is dual-core 2.50 to 3.30 Ghz Intel i3, which should be fast enough to decode 1080p H.264 at the highest bitrates with no slowdown at all.

I just read from the internets that some people (who've had problems with video playback with intel on GNU/Linux) have managed to get video playback working with intel by enabling composition AND by using x11-wm/compton. No idea why this is, but this seems to be a fact for some. Most people do not even realize they need composition, because they use these horribly spiffy GNU/Linuxen with composition enabled by default with pimp'ed window managers and other useless blingbling.

When I get my rig operational, I will
1) Run statistical tests to see if the CPU is powerful enough to decode full HD H.264 (which it definitely should be!)
2) Try enabling composition in X.org config and use compton.
 
Re: 9.2-RELEASE and Intel-KMS, bad video playback performanc

Okay, status update.

I got my rig working (my friend soldered a new SPI-ROM into the motherboard), installed Debian on it and tested out the video playback. As I assumed, everything worked just fine in Debian, so problem not in hardware. The kernel in Debian has newer DRI/DRM stuff in there, so that must have been the cause.

I did backup my 9.2-RELEASE installation on a separate SSD though. With gpart, dump and restore this operation was very easy :)

Yesterday I slapped the SSD containing FreeBSD back in, upgraded to 10.0, recompiled all packages with poudriere, deleted and reinstalled the packages (I could have most likely just upgraded them in place, but did not want to take any chances).

And now video playback works just like it should! No need for VAAPI, just plain GLX works fine :)

I've no idea what changes were made to X.org or kernel, but now video playback with VLC works just as well as in Debian.

I will be testing video playback on some browser and update this thread.
 
Re: 9.2-RELEASE and Intel-KMS, bad video playback performanc

Okay, I did thest the browser playback performance too, and everything works as expected.
 
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