[Pkg-fglrx-devel] Bug#540723: Subject: vlc: video brightness/contrast/gamma is really off

[Gary Dale]

Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> Gary Dale <garydale at rogers.com> writes:
>
>   
>> Reinhard Tartler wrote:
>>     
>>> This really sounds like video driver issues here. I'm reassigning this
>>> bug to both packages for now. However, since fglrx is developed by
>>> AMD/ATI, I persume they would be in the best position to actually do
>>> something about that.
>>>
>>>   
>>>       
>> I might agree except that:
>>
>> 1) my desktop display is fine. I didn't have to do anything with gimp,
>> gwenview or any of my other desktop applications. It was just the video
>> applications that were messed up.
>>     
>
> gimp and other 'normal' applications do not require hardware assistance
> in the same way as a media player needs it. Xv is useful to lower CPU
> consumption in media players. X11 backends makes media players to behave
> like other 'normal' applications, at the expense of wasting CPU time.
>
>   
>> 2) the Kafeine fix was a simple setting that was off while mPlayer
>> needed a different output to be selected. It appears that the fglrx GL
>> implementation is faulty, since I can't get good output from
>> it. However both Kaffeine and mPlayer have no problem with normal x11
>> video. Kaffeine picks x11 automatically while mPlayer needed to be
>> told to use it.
>>     
>
> Video drivers sometimes offer only limited xv ports, which limits the
> number of applications that can simultaneously use the xv extension.
>
>   
>> Unfortunately vlc's x11 video output, which works fine for the other two
>> players, produces bad output. And there doesn't appear to be a way to
>> reduce the extreme contrast like there was in Kaffeine.
>>     
>
> The application could indeed influence this. However, I see little point
> in working around bugs in proprietary display drivers like this in open
> source applications.
>
>   
BTW: as I mentioned in the beginning, I tried to use the open source 
drivers but the ati, radeon and radeonhd drivers don't work with this 
chipset and the vesa driver is really only good for debugging. 
Unfortunately, right now there is no working open source driver for the 
Radeon HD3300 (at least not in Debian). Hopefully AMD's efforts to open 
up its hardware will change this.