I just installed Sabayon 3.2 on my laptop and am using Beryl with Gnome. Everything works great but the video acceleration detector only enables xgl and not aiglx, I can force aiglx and everything runs faster. I have a radeon 9600 mobility. The only problem I am having is video playback in all players runs very poorly when fullscreened. What could be causing this problem and how could I get video to run better?

MrAnt

What player do you use? Try getting into the player preferences and setting video to opengl.

I use VLC and I tried that. When I try to play video fullscreen using opengl under VLC my Xserver crashes and restarts. Could this have something to do with running Beryl with xgl instead of aiglx support? Would opengl playback work in an unaccelerated window manager?

MrAnt

I know how you feel I just discovered this problem myself. If I use kwin, or you could try metacity, the video is much faster. I wasn't expecting beryl to use up so much of my cards performance, especially since it's pretty good. Still that said you need to try out metacity and check if things are faster. I bet they will be. If having beryl is a big sticking point for you then I'd suggest making a script or launcher for your video player which replaces beryl with kwin(metacity) before running and replaces kwin(metacity) with beryl after its finished. Only problem then is that beryl will have been launched from within your terminal if you run it from the command line.

Try using SDL as the video output device. Though in fullscreen, SDL will change resolution to match the resolution of the video. For example in mplayer hit c to cycle through resolutions until the video is shown.

I think the fglrx uses xgl. Try using the radeon driver from Xorg 7.1.

For good video playback, video card software have to support XVideo or else X11 have to be used. X11 uses the raw performance of the CPU to playback video.

Use mplayer for testing because other players are glitchy when using OpenGL and SDL for video playback.

Since Beryl is OpenGL based, OpenGL needs raw performance from the video card. ATI cards are poorly supported in Linux. Only nVidia video cards have excellent support in Linux.

Go to http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2229 to get an idea of OpenGL performance of ATI and nVidia video cards.