Hello everyone,
I recently decided to install in my X5000/40 the latest version of MorphOS, which is 3.16, and for that I bought a Radeon HD 6850 graphics card. Now, this card works well with both OS4 and MorphOS. It doesn't have 3D support on both systems, but I do not care much about it. For MorphOS it supports 2D graphics acceleration, but no overlay.

Since I installed MorphOS in my system, in a second hard disk, I have the following issues, that I am looking to find a way to solve:

1. The HD light on the case is on constantly. Currently I have installed in SATA 0 an SSD that has OS4 installation. On SATA 1 I have an 1TB hard disk which I use for MOS, which has 3 partitions for now, 2 are 20GB and 1 is 128GB. Also I have a sii3112 with a third hard disk with separate partitions for OS4. Unfortunately, this light problem happens even if I have the 1TB disk only connected, even on SATA 0. Does that mean that the hard disk in constantly in reading mode? Is there a possibility that this activity slows down my system?

2. Is the lack of overlay of the gfx card prevents the video playback? I installed the latest mplayer as found at morphos storage, and when I try to play a video it exits without errors. I tried Snoopium to see if I am missing something, but no errors mentioned. Any idea on what I should do with that?

3. Using wayfarer in that machine is not that faster than my Powerbook G4. I haven't yet managed to play any youtube video, but I am not sure if for that is the lack of overlay that prevents it. I set interpolation to low, but I would expect that I wouldn't need to do something like that on such a computer.

Of course I have MorphOS registered. Any feedback is much appreciated.

[ Edited by walkero 16.04.2022 - 23:18 ]

2. Mplayer has an output switch that makes it render into a window without the use of overlay. Check the readme.

3. That likely means that x5000 isn't that much faster than a PowerBook :)

You will not be able to play video in Wayfarer with a card that has no overlay support.

As for interpolation: this setting only makes sense if you're viewing very large images that are scaled down to fit on the page.

Quote:

This is fixed in an upcoming MorphOS release. The HD light is controlled separately from the actual HD activity. So up to MorphOS 3.16, it basically just stays on even if there is no access. The MorphOS X5000 SATA driver takes care of this now.

Quote:

No, the lack of Altivec prevents latest MorphOS MPlayer to work as I never released a non-Altivec version of it up to now. I will look into that for the next update, there has been next to no demand for it this far, I wonder if you are actually the first one to notice ... :)

Thank you all for your fast replies.

@jacadcaps
Quote:

Yeah, that's what I realised so far, although I was expecting a different situation. What I have seen though in Wayfarer, for example, on Revision Party website, the page JS execution remains slow (i.e. the animation at the back which can change with pointer movement), and the CPU usage remains under 30%. And I have seen similar behaviour on other websites as well.

Quote:

I understand. That's fine. It's not the end of the world.

@cyfm
Quote:

That's awesome. Thank you so much for that.

Quote:

Please, do have a look at that, because being able to play video would be nice. I can't believe that all the people who use MorphOS on X5000 do not try to watch videos on their machines.


I am still setting up my machine and I might get back with more queries if I have other issues.
Thank you again guys for your help.

Quote:
The original script with a FPS counter is here:
https://vincentgarreau.com/particles.js/

Without GPU hardware acceleration (or much faster CPUs), it does not really make sense to allow animations to run without some FPS limit because the result will rarely be smooth anyway but can still eat up 100% of the available CPU resources, thus make the entire system crawl.

As others have reported in the past, CSS animations can be more fluid in Odyssey but the price is higher CPU use.

Quote:
The reason is probably that X5000 owners use Linux for running videos!-) There are a) hw acceleration for HD 5000/6000 boards, b) all CPU cores in use and c) non-altivec versions of VLC available. And using with the browsers Greasemonkey and Viewtube(+) scripts you can get the needed stream addresses for VLC.

With a X5040 and a HD 6850 you can easily run 1080p videos/streams vith VLC .

Quote:

Really ? I opened a new thread about this, some time ago
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=12733&forum=9#143336
As I am a simple enduser, I just can't demand things to change.

Quote:
In the meantime before update you can use old version of MPlayer. There is old version without Altivec, I use it on Efika and Pegasos 1 G3. I forgot the version number, but if you cannot find it, I can send it on Tuesday.

In any case, X5000 without Altivec can play at least something, a little more than Efika can

Quote:

Ok, I'm sorry, I stand corrected, you have been the first one to notice. But my point still stands, there has been next to no demand for it ... Time flies and fixing the non-AltiVec version was not just switching a button back then, so I decided just to exit the application early if no AltiVec unit has been detected instead of just crashing.
I will look into that once I have time to update MPlayer again. This is really just a small sideline project and it is no matter of "ignorance" of "simple endusers", so I don't know what you are actually referring to with your last comment.

Quote:
Please look here: morphos-storage MPlayer
Version MPlayer 1.1-SVN-r37401 works for sure without Altivec, I used it on Efika.
Version MPlayer 1.3.0 maybe works.

> Version MPlayer 1.3.0 maybe works. ;-)

See comments #7 and #9.

Quote:
Here comes the second I would also be happy about a non-AltiVec version.