Comment 53 for bug 334101

I would just like to report my success on installing the radeon-drivers and getting smooth video rendering and a working xvideo.
For me, however, radeonhd doesn't work very well so I have to use the radeon driver and modify my xorg.conf in order for it to use the radeon driver instead of the radeonhd driver by default.

Using the radeonhd driver makes the refresh rate of my monitor too low, and I am unable to change it under Preferences->Display (the only refresh rate present there is "0 Hz"). And changing the resolution causes the colors on the screen to get very odd (light green, purple etc.)

But, fortunately, with the radeon driver everything works perfectly. Refresh rate is 85 Hz as usual, and under Preferences->Display I can see this refresh rate and not just "0 Hz".

So, in short, this is what worked for me:

Installing the following packages from Tormod's PPA (https://launchpad.net/~tormodvolden/+archive/ppa):

(I had to remove the old version of xserver-xorg-video-radeon first)
xserver-xorg-video-ati_6.12.99+git20090710.43db263d-0ubuntu0tormod_i386.deb (197.1 KiB)
xserver-xorg-video-ati-dbg_6.12.99+git20090710.43db263d-0ubuntu0tormod_i386.deb (201.5 KiB)
xserver-xorg-video-radeon_6.12.99+git20090710.43db263d-0ubuntu0tormod_i386.deb (507.7 KiB)
xserver-xorg-video-radeon-dbg_6.12.99+git20090710.43db263d-0ubuntu0tormod_i386.deb (1.5 MiB)

Follow instructions on http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonhd%3Ar6xx_r7xx_branch for building new versions of radeon.ko and drm.ko. Copying drm.ko and radeon.ko to "/lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/" and "/lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/radeon" respectively.

Modifying my xorg.conf according to the instructions on the X.Org Wiki and adding the following to the "Device" section so the "radeon" driver is used instead of the default "radeonhd" driver:

Driver "radeon"