There has been recently many advancements in the ati-drivers department, but unfortunately the presently available drivers in the portage 13.1 and above have issues concerning use of XBMC and VSync leading to the 100% of use on o core in processor. I have confirmed the message from the upstream XBMC that one needs to downgrade to the 12.9 version of the driver to be true. Now on my E-350 machine processor usage went down from 100% to 5,3-5,9% in idle! Therefore I would believe including back into portage that version of driver as most appropriate until AMD fixes that particular problem I have tested XBMC-9999 and XBMC-12.0 using ati-drivers-12.9_beta9000 updated to include the shiny features of new ebuilds present in the portage and its working with xorg-server 1.13.3 and kernel 3.8.3
Created attachment 342862 [details] ati-drivers-12.9_beta9000.ebuild The following is the ebuild I used. Patches that it uses which where not present in the original ati-drivers-12.9_beta9000.ebuild are taken directly from portage tree and no changes to them has been made
11 Mar 2013; Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn <chithanh@gentoo.org> -ati-drivers-12.11_beta11.ebuild, -ati-drivers-12.6_beta_pre897.ebuild, -ati-drivers-12.8.ebuild, -files/ati-powermode-opt-path-2.patch: Drop old versions.
Is this for the vanilla or legacy version of the 12.9 driver? I thought the XVBA in 12.9 was broken (for the vanilla version) and are therefore running an old saved 12.10 driver for the very same reason. This does however require xorg <= 1.12 so if this works, it would be a an upgrade. Also thought the original xbmc 12 didn't support XVBA, but this required FernetMentas patches, which has an ebuild on bgo: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453012
@ wippie I had followed advice from XBMC forum http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=158354&pid=1373277#pid1373277 for the most appropriate drivers that are know to be working with XBMC. As I have xorg-server 1.13.3 installed and that I did not want to downgrade to 1.12 than I tried to look for most recent version in the portage http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/x11-drivers/ati-drivers/?hideattic=0&sortby=date#dirlist that was taken from Ubuntu which at the time I have read did unofficially support xorg 1.13 and found version 12.9_beta9000. It might be that Ubuntu have newer version of the driver from 12.x branch that supports xorg 1.13 but I just have not found any so far. As of XVBA I do not use it directly at the moment but through VAAPI which still works
@ Wojciech Myrda You are correct, ati-drivers 12.6, 12.9 (beta) and 12.10 are the only drivers released so far that doesn't have a broken xvba, whereof only this 12.9 (beta) supports xorg 1.13. Some considers the 12.10 to be more stable (i.e. it's not a beta:), but that forces you back to xorg 1.12. Unfortunately, none of these drivers remain in main portage.. The vaapi-wrapper you are using *works*, but is deprecated. The VC1 codec is broken, 24p is not perfect etc. However there are patches to xbmc to use xvba directly, if the driver works. The FernetMenta git source has it all. You could either use the ebuild i linked above but that will need a small modification since it expects xvba-sdk as an independent ebuild (also linked from the page above), but you included the sdk directly in your ati-driver ebuild (nice!:). 13.1 and later always include the sdk files..too bad the drivers are broken tho. The other way to do it, which probably is easier in your case, is to use the original xbmc-9999 ebuild and modify the git source with /etc/portage/env.. Add xbmc_LIVE_REPO="https://github.com/FernetMenta/xbmc.git" EGIT_PROJECT="xbmc-fernetmenta.git" EGIT_BRANCH="master" to /etc/portage/env/xbmc-fernetmenta-gitsource and add media-tv/xbmc xbmc-fernetmenta-gitsource to /etc/portage/package.env Then emerge xbmc-9999 as normal. If everything works, the FernetMenta sources is used, which looks for and uses the installed xvba support (the sdk).
I don't think this is ever going to happen, if you need this, you are going to have to maintain it yourself
Ye this ebuild is deprecated now. Since AMD released some code late 2013. XvBA is now built into vdpau. For anyone else finding this thread, all you need for a fully working system is the radeon drivers from a linux kernel >= 3.12 and mesa >= 10.x. In XBMC just make sure you are using vdpau and everything works out of the box, including hardware accelerated video decoding and hdmi audio.
