16.04 64bit, Macmini Radeon HD 6630M, no video in browsers

Support & Help Requests
,
#1

Cheers,
macmini 2011 with radeon card, installed 16.04 LTS from latest iso, UEFI supported, updated as of 24.05.2016 midnight, added codecs from Welcome link, added mate extras and ubuntu extras. Using default gfx drivers.

  1. Had to use nomodeset even to boot instalation USB. When installed, had to put nomodeset in grub commands to avoid blank screen.

  2. Mate compositor with hardware acceleration works, but Compton uses a lot of cpu/heat.

  3. Chrome: youtube has sound, no video, chrome://gpu/ shows no acceleration card is recognised in all cases. Even disabling hardware acceleration in advanced settings doesn’t show video (this works for example in pure Debian Stable 8.4)

Frustrating thing is that I tried beta 16.04 and video worked then :-/
I remember some thing in the past about some gstreamer 0.1 libs that cause problems and should be removed, but not sure if it is the case here…

#2

I can confirm I am also having some problems with Chromium playing some videos on some sites. No idea why since I have all of the relevant codecs installed. When that happens I use Firefox, which usually works.

The irony being that I initially went over to Chromium around 6 months ago for most media streaming sites due to Firefox being a bit flaky with them. The situation seems to have reversed somewhat now.

#3

Hi @nofreewill,

try running the following command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install pepperflashplugin-nonfree browser-plugin-freshplayer-pepperflash

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#4

Thanx a lot wolfman,

Here are the results:

  • firefox: youtube video plays, noticeable tearing though, especially in HD

  • chrome: still doesn’t recognize hardware acceleration, but at least plays video when acc. is disabled, so half the result! Also tearing and washed colors…

  • furthermore: Marco hardware compositor shifted the screen half to the left, couldn’t bring it back without restart.

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#5

Try running the following terminal commands (Ctrl + Alt + t) and restart if anything updates!:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -f

and/or:

sudo apt-get --fix-missing install

The above command downloads and installs any missing packages on your system.

and/or:

sudo apt-get --fix-broken install

The above command downloads and installs any broken dependencies on your system.

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#6

Thanx,
Marco hardware compositing works OK now, but uses too much cpu, so i am back to software.
No change with Chrome, works without acceleration.

As expected, gaming is not possible, Nexuiz 3d shooter renders throgh software too (a few frames per second)
Nomodeset still neccesery, radoen.modeset=0 or radeon.modeset=1 doesn’t work.

Otherwise, tonight I have added oibaf (graphic card) and KXStudio (music production) repos which add some upgraded libraries so system is no longer “pure” Mate, but everything still works ok, no changes with GPU though.

#7

You haven’t added any AMD (Radeon) drivers from anywhere have you?. Not good if you did!. :thumbsdown:

This might help?:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

#8

No, oibaf is unly updates and fixes of the opensource driver as far as I can say. No changes in the result though.

Heres the thing, “man radeon” doesn’t acctually list my graphic card as supported, there is a lot of them simmilar, but not the line called Whistler :angry:
_01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Whistler [Radeon HD 6630M/6650M/6750M/7670M/7690M] [1002:6741]

#9

Sorry @nofreewill but I can’t really help you any further as I don’t have an ATI GPU!. :frowning:

#10

OIBAF does not have any updated drivers for your GPU.

The “Whistler” is part of the “Turks” family of Radeon HD 66xxM and 67xxM GPUs.
Part of “man radeon”:

  TURKS       Radeon HD 6570/6630/6650/6670/6730/6750/6770

Having to use “nomodeset” pretty much disables all GPU acceleration because you are bypassing the Kernel modesetting which sets up DRI (Direct Rendering). That is why FLASH doesn’t work.

If the version of Beta 16.04 was using an older 4.2 or 4.3 version kernel then that would be why the graphics worked before. Your problem is a kernel regression unfortunately. It looks like your problem was identified and fixed but then lost/forgotten.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=765954

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