LinuxQuestions.org - HOWTO: fglrx and xorg6.7 -- work around for XV.

(Note this is not a guide for getting the ATi fglrx drivers working with xorg...)

HOWTO by slackMeUp,

Background:

So you love slack, have an ATi Radeon, and want to get the most out of it with the fglrx drivers?

Good. Well good if you are running Slackware 9.1. But in Slackware 10 we tossed out xfree86 and tossed in xorg for an X server.

This presents a problem: there is a bug when using the fglrx drivers from ATi and xorg 6.7 that prevents the use of XV. XV is a driver used by popular multimedia apps like Xine or Mplayer that renders video. A simple work around would be to use a different driver such as x11, gl, sdl, or aa. But it only takes a few minutes of viewing to see how bad these video backends are compared to XV.

The bug resides in the rendering of off screen buffers, that the fglrx driver wants to do but is not written to do so under xorg. (ATi only supports xfree86 4.1,4.2,4.3 at the time of this writing while the driver does work with xorg) The result is a resource error when you try to play a video with the XV backend. Some are lucky to get small video files to work... but in my case, nothing would play.

I spent quite a few hours without luck poking around these forums. . . I even started a thread about it... but I found the answer on the official Fedora forum tucked away.

Solution:

Well it's not a perfect fix, but it works better then using another video backend.

Step one: As root, open your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file for editing.

Step two: Under the fglrx device section, add this line somewhere in the misc. options area.

Code:

Option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps" "yes"

Step three: Restart the X server.

enjoy.