Is anyone here having some experience with the DirectFB project? (http://www.directfb.org/)
Looks promosing e.g. it could allow opengl without the overhead of xorg/xfree86 .

So far i am not having much success as compile does not work. Maybe i forgot to download something.

efika_mplayer_directfb.avi

Sorry, bad video quality. I have experimented a few weeks ago with the efika and directfb. The video was taken with the video function of a digital *photo* camera.

you also have to trust me that it's the efika playing the file. the last few seconds of the video show an ssh connection from my powerbook to the efika, which shows the output from top. (you can divine the letters 'mplayer' as the most active process)

I installed this on gentoo with just setting directfb use flag and installing mplayer as normal ("emerge mplayer").

the command to play the video was this:
without the -srate option I'm getting noise in the audio output.

regards,

-markus

I discovered that suse comes with the 2d part of directfb precompiled. But that is without opengl support.

Looking on the mesa site i discovered the following: http://www.mesa3d.org/fbdev-dri.html Currently i am compiling that one.

Only i am hoping that i do not have to compile the drm modules as suse should have them already is i can use 3d in x already. If i have to compile that part i will have to ask again as the readme states that there should be a ./configure but that is non existent for drm.

Could you do a couple of things for me?

1) detail the specs of the video you tried? Size, framerate, codecs used, resolution?

2) try again with a video we can all, too, download without copyright infringement or so :)

It would be good to see it working on many Efikas around the world and quicker to test. We all know an Efika is capable of playing a 320x240 Youtube-sized video, but what about DVD quality? What about higher? That's a question nobody really answers here..

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Matt Sealey

Unfortunately miniglx is missing from the tar.gz files.
using git i got the missing miniglx part.
But miniglx is verry buggy in such an state that is unable to compile.
Looking futher it turned out that fbdev-dri mesagl is unmaintained.
An complete build log can be found here:
http://www.noeska.net/downloads/logfbdevmesagl.txt
Lots of things to be fixed.

As for an mplayer demonstration with directfb:
Could the elephants dream be used as an demo stream:
http://orange.blender.org/download and http://www.elephantsdream.org/

Most of them seem to be that stddef.h is missing, which is incredibly bad for most systems (if it's not in /usr/include something is really very wrong with your build environment - is libc-devel installed?)

In any case, you should be using DirectFBGL with DirectFB.

And if you need portability, SDL in tandem with that.

http://www.directfb.org/index.php?path= ... DirectFBGL
http://www.directfb.org/downloads/Core/ ... DirectFBGL
Indeed, or something else totally. There are a hell of a lot of free - even creative commons - videos out there that can be used.

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Matt Sealey

glibc-devel is installed.

i would be using directfbgl if it were working. I got it to compile. But it does not work. Also on the site is a mention of one of the requirements being an matrox graphics. And i am having an ati card.

The third option is the scitech way. But for that to compile i first need the export command to get working over different scripts.

Maybe i should do a reinstall of debian instead of suse.

Researching some of the errors on the inet i discovered that it could be related to changes in gcc en kernel. The sources of fbdevmesagl are not up to date with nowadays standards. The same also seems to apply to the scitech one.

I made a new topic to make sure my development system is setup as it should be on debian: http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/vi ... php?t=1444

sorry, I haven't read that post the days before.

The movie is from here.

mplayer sais it's this type of file:

VIDEO: [SVQ3] 320x240 32bpp 15.000 fps

the video was upscaled to 1920x1080. The graphics card is radeon 9250.

unfortunately there is currently no OS on my Efika at the moment. (harddrive seems to be dying or a kernel problem)

I'll get back to this thread, when I have it running again.

99.9% of graphics cards have an overlay scaler which essentially means upscaling is a "for free" operation (as is YUV<>RGB conversion).

I'd love to see someone getting a 640x480 or 720x480 movie working at a reasonable rate. The trick seems to be to use DirectFB if you can - X has a horrible amount of overhead (and the desktops you usually put over X make it worse).

Did you, on this system, manage to get DirectFBGL or SDL working for 3D? I'd quite like to see that on the Radeon. I never got to try it myself (at the time I tried DirectFB it had some awful problems and crashes, 0.9.2 kind of era and packaged as a Debian or built from a stable Gentoo ebuild..)

A lot has changed.. right now I'm missing a Radeon (damn it all I have is XGI :) and finding it hard to source a new one, so even if I wanted to try it, I can't..

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Matt Sealey

Looking further into getting directfbgl to work i noticed that my last compile on suse got the DirectFBGL part compiled, but not the mesa part.
Now on compiling the mesa part on debian i discovered that when using the suggested mesa embedded2 branch it is preconfigured for x86 only. Manualy tweaking the makefile did not help either as some essential part was missing (only available in x86?) I posted some question on having problems compiling direcfbgl on powerpc on the direcfb dev mailing list.

The mesa from the mesa git is having a build target for linux-directfb. But building that gave me one error once more. I posted that one on the mesa devel list so i hope to get some answers on that one there.

Standard directfb (2d only) is available precompiled on both suse and debian. But does not come with an xgi drivers for DirectFBGL it should not matter as mesa drivers are used for that, or isn't there a mesa xgi driver either?

The ati 9250 is still on sale in the netherlands: http://www.alternate.nl/html/productDet ... tno=J9GV57 they also deliver outside the netherlands, but you have to ask them on how high the shipping costs will be. (Mail: sales <nospam> alternate.nl )

Got an answer on the mesa dev list the problem with compiling should have been a misplaced quote char in an makefile for the directfb target it should be fixed now (http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/foru ... mesa3d-dev). So i try to update from git later this week and compile again.

we can also find it easily here in France. Ask bbrv to bring you one from here next time they come to Paris ;-)
i can also think about sending you one from here, send me an email if you're interested.

Just use the standard Mesa 7.x branch, as you can download on their site. There is no point using special branches for it as it just means less people can run the result.

As for Radeons I need one in the UK. We have some at the office in Texas but I'm not there. I should be able to get them locally but most resellers are charging extortionate prices.

I'd rather not pay 50 EUR for a card that's really worth about 25 EUR these days.. either way it's not so important that I get one, I am not doing any graphics work right now, and don't plan to compile Mesa on my Efika (it was hard enough by far on a BlizzardPPC..)

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Matt Sealey