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Lucas Kauffman
Asked: 2011-08-26 02:56:51 +0800 CST

How do I enable video decoding on gpu (ATI) and XBMC?

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I just built an HTPC / homeserver, I used ubuntu 10.04 lucid lynx and combined it with xbmc.

The hardware I'm using is Asus e35m pro (embedded low voltage cpu and HD6310 gpu).

However if I run 1080p video footage, everything starts to stutter. I checked with htop from an ssh connection and noticed one of the cores goes into 100% load.

I was wondering why it does not use the GPU instead ? (I have installed proprietary drivers from ATI). Do I have to change settings ?

Is it XBMC related, ubuntu related or does ATI just not support hardware video decoding on their GPU on linux ?

hardware

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I am not sure who to point the finger at, but what essentially happened is that NVIDIA provided one API to do this with their cards and ATI provided one for theirs. As you can guess they are not the same, so in order for programs to take advantage of this, they have to be coded to support it.

    From what I can find, this is not currently in the stable release of XBMC (Dharma 10.1), but lucky for you is in branch for the next release. Your options at this point are to either wait for the Eden edition, or jump ahead and get a nightly build of XBMC. Obviously the nightly build can be unstable, and you have to accept that as part of the risk if you choose to so.

    If you want to go the nightly route, check out this thread on the XBMC forums that gives you a couple different options and ways to get it installed.

    Oh, also apparently if you are willing to go the Windows (ducks just in case somebody gets mad, sorry) route, the zacate seems to work pretty well on that platform also.

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  2. I have same hardware and this thread was big help for me. Especially xbmc from lars-opdenkamp repository.

    http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=98169

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  3. I am assuming you have a fusion based system? For me the following guide was very helpful: http://youresuchageek.blogspot.nl/2012/06/xbmc-install-and-config-howto-for-linux.html

    If you just want xbmc in ubuntu (not standalone) install the xbmc-xvba from the wsnipex ppa as mentioned in the guide. (also follow the bit on only enabling xvba, not vaapi and vdpau and the refreshrates). For me (on ubuntu 12.04) compiz didn't like xbmc but if I started xbmc with the following script it worked as expected and with hardware acceleration:

    #!/bin/bash
metacity --replace &
sleep 2s
xbmc
unity --replace &
exit;

    It will kill compiz, start xbmc, and start compiz again when you're closing xbmc.

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