Matrox Millennium II Xv extension

This patch will enhance the X.org 7.1 Matrox Millennium II driver to support the X video (Xv) extension (extremely useful for playing DVDs and other video formats). The extension is implemented as a CPU to Frame Buffer YUV scaling ILOAD. A true overlay was not used because of a Millennium II hardware limitation that would reduce the maximum usable frame buffer to only 4Mb.

NOTE: This page is mostly for historical reasons. The patch has been included in the official xorg mga driver since version 1.4.7 (dated 5-sep-2007). If you are using xorg 7.3 or newer you already have xv support.

Supported Cards

• Matrox Millennium II PCI (MGA2164W)
• Matrox Millennium II AGP (MGA2164W_AGP)

Features

• YUV->RGB 4:2:2 (UYUY/YUY2) fully hardware accelerated
• YUV->RGB 4:2:0 (YV12/I420) hardware accelerated with software swizzling
• Horizontal upscaling up to 8x fully hardware accelerated (HQ linear filter)
• Horizontal downscaling up to 4x hardware accelerated with software decimation (HQ linear filter)
• Vertical upscaling software linear filtering
• Vertical downscaling software decimation (no filtering)
• Optimized code path for YUV->RGB conversion with 1:1 scaling

Screenshots

Playing a mpeg-4 (divx) file using mplayer on a DEC/Compaq XP1000 (EV67 667MHz)

Playing a DVD using Ogle on a P-3 733MHz.

Known Bugs/Limitations

• horizontal downscaling beyond 8x will crash the X server
• some users reported problems with dual head setups using other matrox cards. Currently I have no way to reproduce and/or fix these problems.
• the driver has been reported not to work on Millennium I.

To Do

• implement xv attributes
• improve software filtering performance
• improve PCI tranfers performance
• implement upscale only optimization (full screen)

Download & Installation

1. download the driver patch
2. download the relased xorg 7.1 mga driver source
3. uncompress the driver and apply the patch to the file src/mga_video.c
4. compile the driver (./configure and then make)
5. replace the current mga_drv.so with the one from src/.lib/mga_drv.so

After restarting X, if the driver was successfully installed you should have the following lines in the XFree86 log file (/var/log/Xorg.0.log)

(II) Loading extension XVideo
. . .
(II) MGA(0): Using MGA 2164W ILOAD video
(II) MGA(0): This is an experimental driver and may not work on your machine.

You will now be able to enjoy reasonable DVD playback speeds in Linux with your Millennium II.