Intel Core i3 H264 GPU Acceleration using Ubuntu and XBMC

Intel Core i3

This article outlines the steps that are needed, starting from a clean Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid), to get DTS 5.1 / Dolby Digital 5.1 through HDMI, and H264 hardware GPU decoding up & running.
It involves the following steps that will be outlined in detail below

• Starting from a clean Ubuntu 10.04 system
• Installing the latest intel-drm-next kernel
• Installing libdrm
• Installing libva
• Installing the latest version of XBMC (needed for libva support)

As the Corei3 CPU (combined with the H55 chipset) platform is hailed as THE htpc platform for 2010, I thought I might give it a try.

When it comes to building an HTPC, your first stop will probably be an Intel Atom / Nvidia Ion combo. They are cheap, well supported (both by the hardware / software vendors, as well as by the community), and you can get things up & running in no time. Thanks to the Nvidia Ion chipset, they’re perfectly capable of decoding 1080p H264 content while maintaining a low power consumption.

When Intel announced their new Clarkdale (desktop CPUs) and Arrandale (notebook CPUs) lineup, the first thing that I noticed was the pricing. Although everybody seemed to be very excited about the integrated GPU and low power consumption, the new Core i5 CPUs were priced relatively high when compared to similar AMD offerings. Even in their own ranks, Intel already had a very interesting quad-core CPU , the core i5 750 that had an excellent performance/price ratio. I doubt that many people want to combine a high-end Clarkdale CPU with a low-end integrated video solution.

According to me, the only true interesting CPU from the Clarkdale line-up was the Core i3 530, currently selling at around 110€. Just like the new Core i5 CPUs, it also features hyperthreading, low power consumption and Intel HD Integrated Graphics, making it an ideal fit for an HTPC build.

Here are some specs regarding the Intel Core i3 530 :

CPU	Core i3 530
Speed	2,93 GHz
Cores	2,93 GHz
HyperThreading	Yes
L2 Cache	2x 256 kB
L3 Cache	4 MB
Memory controller	4 MB
Integrated Graphics Type	Intel HD Graphics
Integrated Graphics Speed	733 Mhz
TPD	73W

IMHO, the platform is overpriced (compared to the Atom / Ion offering, and even some of the AMD offerings).

Starting from a clean Ubuntu system.

When Ubuntu 10.04 is installed, the graphics drivers for the Core i3 integrated GPU should be installed, and your X environment should be fully functional. You can use the advanced Compiz desktop effects out of the box. The kernel installed on the 10.04 by default is

corei3@corei3-desktop:~$ uname -r
2.6.32-21-generic

Ubuntu will prompt you to update your system, through the update manager. Feel free to do so. On a kernel level, you’ll end up having 2.6.32-24-generic.

With an out-of-the-box Ubuntu 10.04 installation however (even after the updates), I wasn’t able to get sound via HDMI into my receiver working.
Running alsamixer revealed only 3 audio devices.

Alsamixer on Ubuntu 10.04 kernel

Many users have reported stability issues when starting from an out-of-the-box Ubuntu 10.04 system on the Core i3 platform. Therefor, the first thing we’ll be doing is upgrading our Linux Kernel.

Installing a new kernel

In order to fix the audio issue you need to install the latest stable kernel. Kernel version 2.6.33 is the latest stable released kernel at the time of writing that will fix the hdmi audio issue. An overview of the kernels can be found here : http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/ . Although this kernel version will fix the sound issue, if won’t provide us with the GPU acceleration we’ll be needing in a while. According to the Intel 2010Q2 graphics package, we need a 2.6.35-ish kernel.

I’ve downloaded v2.6.36-rc3-maverick from here
You need to download the following files:

• the image package
• the headers package
• the headers ‘all’ package.

The files need to correspond to your architecture (amd64 for x86-64 machines and i386 for 32-bit)
For installing the .deb’s, create a folder somewhere on the file-system, and put the following commands in an install-kernel.sh script (give execute permissions to the install-kernel script, and run it) :

FILES="linux-headers-2.6.36-997_2.6.36-997.201009110905_all.deb \
linux-headers-2.6.36-997-generic_2.6.36-997.201009110905_amd64.deb \
linux-image-2.6.36-997-generic_2.6.36-997.201009110905_amd64.deb"

for f in $FILES
do
wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/drm-intel-next/2010-09-11-maverick/$f
done

sudo dpkg -i $FILES
sudo update-grub2

After installing the new kernel, and rebooting your machine, verify that the kernel was succesfully installed (and that you selected the proper kernel version at startup) by exectuting the following command :

corei3@corei3-desktop:~$ uname -r
2.6.36-997-generic

The alsamixer revealed the following audio devices :

Alsamixer on updated kernel

Make sure the SPDIF devices are not muted. (Use the cursor keys to selected the SPDIF devices and press M to un-mute them if necessary).

Alsamixer on new kernel

GPU Acceleration for H264 content

Although we have sound up & running right now, we don’t have GPU acceleration in XBMC at this point. The CPU is doing all the heavy lifting for now as you can see in the screenshot below :

No GPU acceleration for H264 content - high cpu usage

Although the Intel Core i3 530 is perfectly capable of decoding H264 content without the help of its GPU, there are a couple of advantages in letting the GPU perform this task :

• less heat produced by the CPU when decoding h264 1080p video content
• less fan noise due to lower CPU temperatures.
• ability to perform other CPU intensive tasks while decoding h264 1080p video content.

Installing libdrm

The next step is to install libdrm.
Libdrm can be downloaded at http://dri.freedesktop.org/libdrm/.
In order to install it, execute the following commands

sudo apt-get build-dep libdrm
wget http://dri.freedesktop.org/libdrm/libdrm-2.4.21.tar.gz
tar -zxpvf libdrm-2.4.21.tar.gz
cd libdrm-2.4.21
./configure
make
sudo make install

Installing libva with Corei3 support

I downloaded the latest libva from the ubuntu site (http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main//libv/libva/) but that didn’t do much good.
I ended up downloading Libva from http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/libva/

Before you’re able to build libva, you’ll need to install the following build dependencies :

sudo apt-get install cdbs libdrm-dev x11proto-xext-dev libxext-dev libxfixes-dev libgl1-mesa-dev automake1.9

wget http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/libva/libva_0.31.1-1+sds4.tar.gz
tar -zxpvf libva_0.31.1-1+sds4.tar.gz
cd libva-0.31.1
./configure --enable-i965-driver --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

Notice how libva is configured to enable the i965 driver. This is required in order to have h264 hardware acceleration.
This will install the driver correctly.

Another way is create debian packages from the source tree, and install them using the dpkg utility.

wget http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/libva/libva_0.31.1-1+sds4.tar.gz
tar -zxpvf libva_0.31.1-1+sds4.tar.gz
cd libva-0.31.1
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -us
sudo dpkg -i ../libva1_0.31.1-1+sds4_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i ../libva-driver-i965_0.31.1-1+sds4_amd64.deb

This will generate the following artifacts :

• libva-dev_0.31.1-1+sds4_amd64.deb
• libva1_0.31.1-1+sds4_amd64.deb
• libva1-dbg_0.31.1-1+sds4_amd64.deb
• libva-driver-i965_0.31.1-1+sds4_amd64.deb

You can install these packages by executing the following command (from the libva folder) :

sudo dpkg -i ../libva*.deb

vainfo is a tool included with libva that you can use to verify the installation of the va library.

corei3@corei3-desktop:~/Downloads/test2/libva-0.31.1$ ./test/vainfo
libva: libva version 0.31.1
libva: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva: Trying to open /usr/lib/dri/i965_drv_video.so
libva: va_openDriver() returns 0
lt-vainfo: VA API version: 0.31
lt-vainfo: Driver version: i965 Driver 0.1
lt-vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
VAProfileMPEG2Simple            :    VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileMPEG2Main              :    VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264Baseline           :    VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264Main               :    VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264High               :    VAEntrypointVLD
corei3@corei3-desktop:~/Downloads/test2/libva-0.31.1$

Installing XBMC

We’ll be using XBMC as our video player to test both the audio over HDMI as well as the GPU acceleration .
There are several ways and versions to install xbmc.

• Installing the current version from the ppa:team-xbmc repository
• Installing XBMC 10.00~svn33324 from the ppa:team-xbmc-svn/ppa
• Downloading the sources and building XBMC yourself

We’ll be choosing the third option, as the svn build located in the ppa:team-xbmc-svn/ppa repository doesn’t have the VA-API option available in the XBMC config screen (See this bug report for more info).
For completeness however, I’ll be outlining all different ways of installing XBMC.

Installing the current version from the ppa:team-xbmc repository

Execute the following commands to start xbmc :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc xbmc-standalone
xbmc & 

Installing XBMC 10.00~svn33324 from the ppa:team-xbmc-svn/ppa

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc-svn/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xmbc

This will install XBMC 10.00~svn33324

Downloading the sources and building XBMC yourself

You can also download the sources and build it directly. For that, you need to execute the following commands:

sudo apt-get install subversion
cd $HOME
svn checkout http://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/trunk xbmc

This will install subversion (the svn command), and checkout the latests XBMC sources from the trunk, into a folder called xbmc in your home dir.

Now, before we can start building the XBMC source, we need to make sure we have the required build packages installed. If we don’t have the required build packages installed on the Ubuntu system, we’ll get the following error :

checking boost/shared_ptr.hpp presence... no
checking for boost/shared_ptr.hpp... no
configure: error: Could not find a required library. Please see the README for your platform.

There is a README.ubuntu file in the XBMC folder, telling us there are 2 ways to get the build packages. One option is to list them all :

sudo aptitude install subversion make g++ gcc gawk pmount libtool nasm automake cmake gperf unzip bison libsdl-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-gfx1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libfribidi-dev liblzo2-dev libfreetype6-dev libsqlite3-dev libogg-dev libasound-dev python-sqlite libglew-dev libcurl3 libcurl4-gnutls-dev x11proto-xinerama-dev libxinerama-dev libxrandr-dev libxrender-dev libmad0-dev libogg-dev libvorbisenc2 libsmbclient-dev libmysqlclient-dev libpcre3-dev libdbus-1-dev libhal-dev libhal-storage-dev libjasper-dev libfontconfig-dev libbz2-dev libboost-dev libfaac-dev libenca-dev libxt-dev libxtst-dev libxmu-dev libpng-dev libjpeg-dev libpulse-dev mesa-utils libcdio-dev libsamplerate-dev libmms-dev libmpeg3-dev libfaad-dev libflac-dev libiso9660-dev libass-dev libssl-dev fp-compiler gdc libwavpack-dev libmpeg2-4-dev libmicrohttpd-dev libmodplug-dev libssh-dev gettext cvs

Another option (something that didn’t work for me) is to add this to your repos http://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc-svn/+archive/ppa and calling the following commands :

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get build-dep xbmc

I was unable to execute the command above, so I had to install the build dependencies manually (first option). Apparently, this issue has also been reported by several other users.

Next step is to to run the following commands to start the build and install XBMC :

./bootstrap
./configure
make
sudo make install

Configuring XBMC video settings

Now it’s time to launch XBMC. The second time I tried this tutorial (re-installed ubuntu from scratch), my XBMC user interface was very slow. The movies played fine, but the main XBMC interface was very sluggish. This was fixed ny setting the vsync from 3 to 2 in my guisettings.xml (located in ~/.xbmc/userdata/guisettings.xml)

    <videoscreen>
        <guicalibration></guicalibration>
        <haslcd>false</haslcd>
        <resolution>0</resolution>
        <screen>0</screen>
        <screenmode>WINDOW</screenmode>
        <testpattern></testpattern>
        <vsync>2</vsync>
    </videoscreen>

I don’t know why this worked out-of-the-box the first time I ran it.

Now, to continue, we need to make sure that VAAPI is enabled in XBMC. (System – Video – Playback)

Enable VAAPI in XBMC

Configuring XMBC audio settings

Once this is done, configure your XBMC audio settings like this.

XBMC Audio Settings

This allows us to get the audio up & running, and have support for DTS 5.1 and Dolby Surround 5.1,

Playing some videos

Now launch a video and press the “o” key to display the stats. The first impressions were pretty awfull. The CPU load was reduced, but we saw a lot of dropped frames, and the image wasn’t watchable due to heavy stuttering.

XBMC VAAPI H264 gpu acceleration with compiz

Apparently, Compiz was to blame here. The Ubuntu Desktop Efforts (System – Preferences – Appearance – Desktop Effects) was having were set to “Extra”. Putting these to none resolved the dropped frames issue, and the video was fluent, with less then 10% CPU utilization.

XBMC VAAPI H264 gpu acceleration without compiz

Installing the pached mplayer

Get the latest mplayer from here http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/mplayer-vaapi/

sudo apt-get build-dep mplayer
wget http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/mplayer-vaapi/mplayer-vaapi-latest-FULL.tar.bz2
bunzip2 mplayer-vaapi-latest-FULL.tar.bz2
tar -xpvf mplayer-vaapi-latest-FULL.tar
cd mplayer-vaapi-20100713
./checkout-patch-build.sh
cd mplayer-vaapi/
./mplayer -vo vaapi -va vaapi ~/Desktop/hd_thx_amazing_life_lossless.m2ts

When a video is playing, you should see the following output :

corei3@corei3-desktop:~/Downloads/mplayer-vaapi-20100713/mplayer-vaapi$ ./mplayer -vo vaapi -va vaapi /media/120260D90260C379/Video/Kick-Ass4/title00.mkv
MPlayer SVN-r31722-4.4.3 (C) 2000-2010 MPlayer Team
mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

Playing /media/120260D90260C379/Video/Kick-Ass4/title00.mkv.
libavformat file format detected.
[matroska @ 0x2d5fac0] Estimating duration from bitrate, this may be inaccurate
[lavf] stream 0: video (h264), -vid 0
[lavf] stream 1: audio (dca), -aid 0, -alang eng, HD Lossless
[lavf] stream 2: subtitle (pgssub), -sid 0, -slang nld
VIDEO:  [H264]  1920x1080  0bpp  23.976 fps    0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
libva: libva version 0.31.1-sds1
libva: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva: Trying to open /usr/lib/va/drivers/i965_drv_video.so
libva: va_openDriver() returns 0
==========================================================================
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
[VD_FFMPEG] VA API accelerated codec.
Selected video codec: [ffh264] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg H.264)
==========================================================================
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders
AUDIO: 48000 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 1536.0 kbit/100.00% (ratio: 192000->192000)
Selected audio codec: [ffdca] afm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg DTS)
==========================================================================
[AO OSS] audio_setup: Can't open audio device /dev/dsp: No such file or directory
AO: [alsa] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Starting playback...
Unsupported PixelFormat 61
[VD_FFMPEG] Trying pixfmt=1.
Movie-Aspect is 1.78:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
VO: [vaapi] 1920x1080 => 1920x1080 H.264 VA-API Acceleration
[VD_FFMPEG] XVMC-accelerated MPEG-2.
A:  67.9 V:  67.9 A-V:  0.003 ct:  0.001   0/  0 23% 11%  3.5% 12 0

MPlayer interrupted by signal 2 in module: key_events
A:  68.0 V:  68.0 A-V:  0.026 ct:  0.004   0/  0 23% 11%  3.5% 12 0

References

• VAAPI Homepage
• Wikipedia entry for VAAPI
• Linux Graphics Drivers from Intel
• Intel hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding on Linux
• H264 decoding support patch announcement
• Nehalem Microarchitecture