[mythtv] request: OSX mythfrontend and winmyth for CVS backend

Joseph A. Caputo jcaputo1 at comcast.net
Thu Jan 27 16:11:17 EST 2005


On Thursday 27 January 2005 14:45, Jeremiah Morris wrote:
> On 27 Jan 2005, at 1:30 PM, Joseph A. Caputo wrote:
> 
> > (1) Is building for non-altivec (i.e., G3) working?  At one point I
> > thought I was able to build on my G3 iBook by modifying config.h and
> > config.mak, but I can't seem to with CVS as of last week.
> 
> I did make a bunch of Altivec changes last Friday, so I may have 
either 
> fixed it or broken it unintentionally. Run "./configure 
> --disable-altivec", and manually change settings.pro to read 
> "TARGET_ALTIVEC=no" on line 120.  If it's still failing, send me the 
> error log (either on- or off-list) and we can work through it.

Thanks, I'll give it a try.

> >   I know you
> > and Nigel have been working on incorporating all this into qmake, so
> > I'll try tonight with your script and latest CVS...
> 
> The script doesn't yet have a non-Altivec option, so you'll have to do 
> some tweaking if you use that. (Basically you have to get it to change 
> settings.pro.) For now, if you're already set with the dependencies, 
it 
> might be easier to just build it normally, like you have in the past. 
> I'll try to get this fixed soon.

Right; for my purposes that's just fine.

> > (2) What is the likelihood that the frontend code will ever be 
tweaked
> > to the point of being able to watch video via the frontend on a G3?
> 
> Not very likely, in my opinion. With mpeg2dec, I can just barely watch 
> a 640x480 stream on my G4 450, but it still chokes on OSD blending 
> (which is not Altivec optimized yet). From what I've been reading 
about 
> video performance through VLC, MPlayer, etc. it's not just a Myth 
> problem, it's just CPU-intensive work.
> 
> At this point, you might ask how a G3 can watch video from a DVD. 
> Apple's DVD player accesses the motion-compensation and IDCT functions 
> on the video card (the same thing that XvMC does), but there's no 
> user-level API for this, so Myth can't use the same tricks that Apple 
> uses. If Apple adds this API in 10.4 or something, it may be possible 
> to speed things up, but it's equally likely that they wouldn't bother 
> supporting the video cards from the G3 era.

I thought as much, but how about MPEG-4 decoding?  Isn't that less 
CPU-intensive?  Has anyone tested performance for non-MPEG2 
mythfrontend playback?

-JAC


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