Dell Vostro 1000 Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy ATI Xpress 1150 XV VideoOverlay

When I installed Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy on my Dell Vostro 1000 almost everything worked with no or almost no configuration.
In this version even the setup of the ATI driver was done via one or two mouseclicks but I noticed that normal dvd playback is somewhat slow and I first put that onto the powermanagement but when I tried the mediaplayer frontend gxine I noticed that “xv” wasn’t available for my card in the current setup, so I googled around and found out that you need to add an option variable to your device section in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf to make “xvinfo” print out some valuable information.

Option “VideoOverlay” “on”

After you added this to your device section of your graphics card, close all applications and press ctrl+alt+backspace. Your X server will restart and you’ll need to login again.

My dvd playback then was on a whole different level of quality and it’s now really smooth plus my turion tl60 both stay at 800mhz while playing PLUS my battery duration has increased from 3 to 4 hours! I lost 1 hour before just because I was missing a single line in my xorg.conf :).

I don’t know if this can be considered a bug but I’m sure this line can be there by default for most graphics hardware.

However, I’m glad now it works even better than before.