Hey there. I recently purchased an Efika MX Smartbook, and was considering purchasing an Efika MX Smarttop also. I had been intending to use it as a test platform for a simple, fullscreen media player that I'm planning on developing.

I realize these machines are not intended to be particularly speedy, but from the few forum posts I've been able to track down, I was under the impression that there was working 2D/3D acceleration and the packaging my Smartbook arrived in states "Full hardware-accellerated HD720 playback". However, it seems that my Smartbook is using a software GL rasterizer, and no videos I've tested have been playable, even at sub-SD resolutions.

On Matt Sealey's March 1st blog post he says: I am using the relevant repositories, and appear to have the required packages installed, but don't seem to be getting decent video performance. Should I download the installer image and start from a fresh install?

Are there any additional steps I should be taking to improve performance? I'm not at all familiar with ARM, or i.MX, and was hoping to use this hardware as a learning experience.

I assume from looking at posted specs that any information on this should be relevant to the Smarttop as well.

In any case, I really do like this hardware. It's definitely worth every penny, considering how thin and light it is.

Any suggestions or experiences are appreciated.

The Ubuntu 10.10 packages are compiled for OpenGL , used on Desktop CPU x86 and PowerPc, with Ubuntu 11.04 the packages will be compiled for OpenGLES , used on embedded CPU like ARM ,so you will see the 2D/3D acceleration.

If you want to test now the 3D capability of Efika you can install from repository glmark2-es2 and run it.

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http://deliriotecnologico.blogspot.com

To get better video performance, install MPlayer - somehow it provides much better experience than default Totem + Rhytmbox combination.

Much like the original poster, I have not had any luck enabling 2D acceleration. Without that, browsing the web becomes a very difficult chore. Pressing the space bar to scroll down a page sometimes takes several seconds. I do have the repository added, and everything is apt-get updated/upgraded. But no luck.

How do I enable the acceleration?

Secondly, who do I speak to regarding finding out what the return policy is like if any?

Thanks,

Daze

I've tried both Totem and MPlayer (with several output modes) and neither of them can achieve more than 1 frame per several seconds (around 20-30). I've tried several files from tiny to huge resolution, and various codecs.

This sort of performance is just ridiculous, especially since it's advertised to do 720p video playback.

All I can say is that I can get acceptable video performance with my smartbook and MPlayer. Make sure that you use the default X11 output in MPlayer. Using other outputs (for example GL or GL2) is a bad idea.

You can also try the Android 2.2 image that was made available. It can play some movies (codes issues probably) and smartbook is able to play them correclty.

With x11 output in MPlayer, I get at most 0.1fps on a 700mb 2h mpeg2 video. I don't consider that acceptable. Xv doesn't work at all.

Thanks for the advice, but Android is useless on a netbook, and I don't want to dual boot (is that possible btw?) just to play video.

Afaict, there's no hardware acceleration at all going on. I note that now, the efika mx netbook page on genesi's site states that there isn't yet software support for the hardware decoding. I wonder when it'll happen.

Xv is disabled because it locks the system specifically (we did have it enabled in the past but some kernel finagling seems to have broken it) and in general, it steals memory bandwidth for the VPU and IPU - we are working on a new driver which uses GPU texturing to render the video data and offload the bus (and the conversion) from that arbiter and those IP cores.

Multimedia acceleration is a twofold problem - first of all, that what we ship has to absolutely work out of the box, that means you pick a video file, it plays, it does not crash the system. You get that now, it's just sloooow because it's all done on the CPU.

Second of all, several media codecs are patented and to ship software that plays them we have to pay patent royalties to people like the MPEG LA, Thomson, Fraunhofer, Apple. Some of this isn't set up so if we shipped *today* we'd have accelerated video codecs but no audio codecs, and this means playing video becomes rather pointless in the end..

Once they're resolved we'll release. Current work focuses on the 2D driver (new Xv overlay method) and a kernel update.

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Matt Sealey

I see. Barring legal issues, is all this planned for 11.04?

Assuming the legal issues don't get solved (quickly), could any arrangements be made for those who live in jurisdictions without software patents?

Also, could the audio be handled via software (perhaps user-installable)? Hardware video and software audio would still be an improvement.

Interresting thread !

I've read several times about efikaMx on efikamx blog :

-Accelerated 2D and 3D drivers installed-

I then guess that this was not meant to say that 2D and 3D was fully accelerated ? Which I thought at first

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Ubuntu Computers from France on http://ekimia.fr

3D (as in OpenGL ES/ES2 through EGL) is fully accelerated now. It as accelerated as any embedded product has ever been (e.g. the iPad) - it has embedded GL, but not desktop GL. People just need to start writing more GL ES2 apps for linux.

2D (as in X desktop, video, OpenVG) is partially accelerated now, but we are working on that.

thanks for those precise details. I've read about the OpenGLES fact so I should have guessed.

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Ubuntu Computers from France on http://ekimia.fr

I just got my Efika MX smartbook yesterday. and I've been playing with it nonstop since. the following mplayer command line options might help those of you that want to view videos until the Xv extension is fixed.
seems to work for all of my avi files except for some of the really high definition ones.

it's not perfect but it does play smoothly enough even in fullscreen to be usable. I can't wait until the acceleration is fixed.

Actually sdl output seems 10% slower on my smartbook than default output.

Default output

BENCHMARKs: VC: 58.678s VO: 7.744s A: 0.000s Sys: 1.807s = 68.229s
BENCHMARK%: VC: 86.0016% VO: 11.3499% A: 0.0000% Sys: 2.6486% = 100.0000%

SDL output

BENCHMARKs: VC: 48.570s VO: 23.687s A: 0.000s Sys: 1.781s = 74.039s
BENCHMARK%: VC: 65.6009% VO: 31.9932% A: 0.0000% Sys: 2.4059% = 100.0000%

The other thing I noticed is that Pulse Audio can be a real CPU hog when it needs to convert frequency. When MP3 has 44khz, Pulse uses 5-10%, when MP3 has 48khz, pulse seems to use 25%-35% of CPU

you are right about SDL, but I use it to do scaling so I can fit the movie to the screen.


ETA I just did some more fiddling and it looks like using -ao openal seems to work a lot better at least for me.