How well is this card supported for it's capture capabilities and dual head?
--
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On Mon, Feb 05, 2001 at 11:31:57AM -0500, Wakko Warner wrote:
> How well is this card supported for it's capture capabilities and dual head?
Capture and dual head are almost totally unsupported without using a
proprietary, binary only driver chunk which will soundly place your system as
'unsupported' as far as this list is concerned due to the difficulty of
debugging a system when sourceless software bangs the hardware.
If this situation is not ideals for you, I suggest you address the issue
with Matrox.
That said, it is a dandy general 2d/3d card.
On 5 Feb 01 at 12:36, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 05, 2001 at 11:31:57AM -0500, Wakko Warner wrote:
> > How well is this card supported for it's capture capabilities and dual head?
>
> Capture and dual head are almost totally unsupported without using a
> proprietary, binary only driver chunk which will soundly place your system as
> 'unsupported' as far as this list is concerned due to the difficulty of
> debugging a system when sourceless software bangs the hardware.
Under X. Under framebuffer both heads of G400 will work for you if
it is your primary video devices. For capture capabilities see
http://marvel.sourceforge.net. It for sure worked sometime in the past,
but I'm not sure about current state. But I believe that at least
watching TV works correctly.
And if you insist on X, you can run first head through mga with
usefbdev /dev/fb0 with hwcursor off, and secondary head through fbdev
/dev/fb1. But it is not supported by me (and neither by XFree guys AFAIK,
not even talking about Matrox support guys) - I support only first head
in X and secondary head used for 'fbtv -k'.
> If this situation is not ideals for you, I suggest you address the issue
> with Matrox.
I'm trying... more or less. Next G450 BIOSes will have fix for
matroxfb deadlock on boot, so there is at least some move. Although now
when workaround is implemented in matroxfb, it is a bit late...
Best regards,
Petr Vandrovec
[email protected]
BTW, under G450 output to TV is not supported and I'm not sure it ever
will. Output to second monitor is of course supported.
On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, Wakko Warner wrote:
> How well is this card supported for it's capture capabilities and dual head?
The capture features are undocumented and unsupported (to my knowledge).
As far as I have heard, the Rainbow Runner card is not supported in Linux
and Matrox has no plans of doing it.
As for the dual monitor...
You need XFree86 4.0.1 or later. Matrox has drivers for 4.0.1. The last
time I checked, they did not have anything that compiles under 4.0.2.
Dual monitor mode works with xinerama as long as you are at the same
resolution and color depth. (I have it working on my machine here. The
Matrox driver docs tell how to make it work. It is not hard.)
I have noticed some visual problems on the second screen under 4.0.2.
(Ugly, but usable.) Not certain when that will get fixed. Due to Matrox
using a proprietary library (HALlib), there is not alot of effort being
put into making it work right. (Kind of working in the dark at this
point...)
This is more of a question for the xpert list on xfree86.org.
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On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, Alan Olsen wrote:
>The capture features are undocumented and unsupported (to my knowledge).
(your knowledge is incorrect.)
>As far as I have heard, the Rainbow Runner card is not supported in Linux
>and Matrox has no plans of doing it.
Unsupported by whom? Matrox? That would assume they support it under
Windows (they barely do -- or used to.) However, you are correct in that
Matrox has no intentions of creating Linux drivers for the video capture
capabilities of the card. And they are not extremely forthcoming with
information -- it would appear both MacroVision and DVDCCA have nukes
wired into their offices :-)
>This is more of a question for the xpert list on xfree86.org.
Or the marvel list or the livid list...
--Ricky
[email protected] said:
> And if you insist on X, you can run first head through mga with
> usefbdev /dev/fb0 with hwcursor off, and secondary head through fbdev /
> dev/fb1. But it is not supported by me (and neither by XFree guys
> AFAIK, not even talking about Matrox support guys) - I support only
> first head in X and secondary head used for 'fbtv -k'.
Unless your machine is x86, and you use the binary-only HALlib from Matrox,
that is. :(
However, since the second heads of both G400 and G450 cards are supported
in matroxfb, there's no real reason why the support in the 'real' XFree86
driver should be so far behind. The main barrier to dual-head support in
XFree86, last time I knew, was the lack of a way to _configure_ it. That's
now been fixed, obviously. The HALlib is used only for mode setup, AFAICT.
All acceleration is still done by the real driver.
Petr - how much of the matroxfb code is yours to give, and would you permit
chunks of it to be reused under the XFree86 licence? Clean-room
reverse-engineering is such a PITA :)
> I'm trying... more or less. Next G450 BIOSes will have fix for
> matroxfb deadlock on boot, so there is at least some move. Although
> now when workaround is implemented in matroxfb, it is a bit late...
I think that workaround wants to be put in place for G400 too; not just
G450.
--
dwmw2
On 6 Feb 01 at 9:36, David Woodhouse wrote:
> [email protected] said:
> > And if you insist on X, you can run first head through mga with
> > usefbdev /dev/fb0 with hwcursor off, and secondary head through fbdev /
> > dev/fb1. But it is not supported by me (and neither by XFree guys
> > AFAIK, not even talking about Matrox support guys) - I support only
> > first head in X and secondary head used for 'fbtv -k'.
>
> Unless your machine is x86, and you use the binary-only HALlib from Matrox,
> that is. :(
>
> However, since the second heads of both G400 and G450 cards are supported
> in matroxfb, there's no real reason why the support in the 'real' XFree86
> driver should be so far behind. The main barrier to dual-head support in
> XFree86, last time I knew, was the lack of a way to _configure_ it. That's
> now been fixed, obviously. The HALlib is used only for mode setup, AFAICT.
> All acceleration is still done by the real driver.
>
> Petr - how much of the matroxfb code is yours to give, and would you permit
> chunks of it to be reused under the XFree86 licence? Clean-room
> reverse-engineering is such a PITA :)
Initialization code is entirely mine, sometime written with Matrox docs
in hand, sometime without; except G100 initialization, which was written
with cooperation with others. But proper initialization have to parse
BIOS - now when PCI subsystem can enable/disable ROM, maybe I should try
it.
Accelerator code was written/enhandced by couple of peoples except me,
so it is probably impossible to get it under X - but they have some
acceleration already, right ? ;-)
Dualhead code is written entirely by me, and at least some portions
are already used in BeOS driver, probably under GPL, but I have no
problem releasing code under any other license you can imagine, as long
as it does not impose additional restrictions on my (me personally,
not future of matroxfb) further work.
There maybe problem that i2c examples were used when writting core
of maven driver. But real useful code should not be affected by this.
BTW, http://platan.vc.cvut.cz/~vana/maven/mavenreg.html contains
partial MAVEN documentation, as I assembled it more than year ago
for my own needs. But it is really partial, as most of TVOut equations
are present only in code, and not in `datasheet'. I have some about
half year old updates to that datasheet which were submitted by someone
who had access to TV signal analyser, but I did not integrate them to
HTML yet. And my code does not support original G200 TV Out, only
late (non-US, MGA-TVO-C) G200 and G400 are supported for TV.
> > I'm trying... more or less. Next G450 BIOSes will have fix for
> > matroxfb deadlock on boot, so there is at least some move. Although
> > now when workaround is implemented in matroxfb, it is a bit late...
>
> I think that workaround wants to be put in place for G400 too; not just
> G450.
According to Matrox engineers last G400 BIOSes already contains this
workaround. And as G400 initialization from scratch is not officially
supported by me... Yes, I should dig old G400 somewhere, replace one of
my G450 with it and code something up.
Best regards,
Petr Vandrovec
[email protected]
Le 05 Feb 2001 12:36:37 -0500, Gregory Maxwell a ?crit :
> On Mon, Feb 05, 2001 at 11:31:57AM -0500, Wakko Warner wrote:
> > How well is this card supported for it's capture capabilities and dual head?
>
> Capture and dual head are almost totally unsupported without using a
> proprietary, binary only driver chunk which will soundly place your system as
> 'unsupported' as far as this list is concerned due to the difficulty of
> debugging a system when sourceless software bangs the hardware.
>
> If this situation is not ideals for you, I suggest you address the issue
> with Matrox.
So, which gfx cards are "GPL friendly" ?
Xav