[ATrpms-users] libmyth for fglrx

[Kevin J. Cummings]

OK, I'm just asking a question, but, before I do, let me present my
findings first, and then, if people think I should, I'll put it in an
RFE for MythTV as built by ATRpms.

ATI has stated publicly that they don't support MythTV in their fglrx
X11 driver.  [the reason being is that it hasn't worked for a while now
and they feel no compelling reason to fix it anytime soon.]

I recently bought a new laptop, and it came with an ATI Mobile Radeon
X1600 w/256MB.  I wanted to be able to use it with my MythTV backend
(running on FC5 w/nvidia GeForce MX400), so I installed Mythtv (FC6) on
my new laptop and then discovered the previous statement.

The following is cut/pasted from the MythTV wiki from:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/AtiProprietaryDriver

>  Wrong colors
> 
> Until at least fglrx-8.33.6 there are wrong colors with xv playback, E.g. faces look blue. In libs/libmythtv/videoout_xv.cpp you can uncomment
> 
> #define USE_ATI_PROPRIETARY_DRIVER_XVIDEO_HACK
> 
> Confirmed blue "smurf" vision: fglrx-8.34.8. (Radeon X1950 Series / Ubuntu 7.04)
> [edit]

So, yesterday I downloaded the mythtv-suite-0.20.1-158.src.rpm from
ATRpms and built it on my FC6 laptop.  (OK, long story short, I had to
break a large number of dependencies from livna, which were shipped with
my laptop, in order to provide the proper required RPMs to build this
src.rpm.  Most notably, ffmpeg 2.5 seems to be incompatible with other
software which requires version < 2.5!).  So, I modified the source file
as described above, and rebuilt mythtv RPMs.  The only one I was
interested in was the libmyth RPM, and that was the only one I installed.

I then tested it by viewing some of my recordings.  The colors are now
correct!

So, my question:  Can either a seperate libmyth RPM be provided for
systems running fglrx?  Or better yet, is there a way to turn this
compile time check into a runtime check so that 2 versions of this RPM
don't have to co-exist????  The define only seems to control the
following code snippet:

#ifdef USE_ATI_PROPRIETARY_DRIVER_XVIDEO_HACK
    swap(ids[0], ids[2]);
#endif // USE_ATI_PROPRIETARY_DRIVER_XVIDEO_HACK

MythTV seems to have worked around the problem by providing the "hack"
fix.  Would it be better to have 2 RPMs (one for the broken ATI fglrx
and the curent on fo everyone else?)

If not, I'll be relegated to rebuilding MythTV everytime it gets
released.  (I'm sure there are simpler ways to rebuild just the libmyth
RPM, but I haven't figured it out yet.  It also may be possible to put
the DEFINE somehow in the SPEC file as a compile time define, but I
haven't looked into that either, so I extracted the source file,
modified it, and rebuilt the .tar.bz2 archive with th modified file so I
could use a simple "rpmbuild -bb" to do the work for me.)

If someone wants me to, I'd be happy to file an RFE for this.

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)