[mythtv-users] Abilities of the VIA motherboards

[Mark Nysen]

Great to hear that your tv output is working well with
this board.  I have the same board including a 250 and am
wondering if the quality issues I'm seeing are due to
something I'm doing or if you or anyone else is seeing
the same things.

I'm recording in 720x480 at 4400/6000 on the pvr250 and
playback seems to stutter somewhat, especially just after
starting a playback or just after entering live tv (until
I pause the stream for a few seconds).  What resolution/
bitrate are you using?  What's odd is that cpu is only at
60% or so (using mplayer).  I'll try playing with the nice
levels to make it more responsive.

Also, the tv quality of the picture appears to be softer
or almost out of focus or blurry compared to watching TV
directly.  Is anyone else seeing this?  My Myth box is
connected to the TV via a 6 meter composite cable and I'm
wondering if this quality issue is due to the length or
cable type.

I'll try moving the box closer to the TV and using a shorter
cable and also an svideo cable instead to compare results.

As for Mpeg4/divx, the board did really well on a few
episodes of Threat Matrix that I'd gotten from other
sources.  They were in xvid format 640x352 940000 bitrate
and used about 10-20% cpu playing back.  The quality was
very good by my standards (tv like) but I don't recall if
I was seeing the same softness as I do with the pvr250
recordings.

	Mark


On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 10:42, bpierce815 at charter.net wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Nov 2003 12:16:09 -0600
>   "Chris Ward" <cward at go-integral.com> wrote:
> >about a 6 fairly consistantly. Is it fair to assume that 
> >the numbers are before the recent update in drivers? 
> >Would people rate them better now? 
> 
> I would hold off on your judgement of the new drivers as 
> so far, I am the only one who has seen these drivers 
> perform vastly better than the old ones.  I have not seen 
> where anyone else has tried them out.  And 1 person does 
> not constitute a consensus.
> 
> >Also, do the current issues of output limitations from 
> >the music visualizations and dvd's and divix that I have 
> >read about when using the PVR350 also apply to the video 
> >out on the VIA boards? 
> 
> I have never seen the output of the PVR350 so I cannot say 
> how it works.  The observations that I have seen on the 
> PVR250 - video playback is fantastic with MPEG2.  I have 
> not seen playback of MPEG4/DIVX yet.  The Visualizations 
> work, however if you view them in full screen mode, some 
> of them can become CPU intensive and slow the 
> visualizations down.  This does not seem to affect audio 
> playback, however.
> 
> >I see that a few people on the list do use these boards, 
> >so I was wondering what they thought of the capabilities 
> >of them vs a full computer system. They are certainly a 
> >lot smaller and cheaper (and lower CPU freq) if you are 
> >buying a system from scratch.
> >
> 
> I would only use this motherboard for specialized 
> applications.  From my observations, It seems much too 
> slow to use as a Desktop or Workstation PC, ie.. opening 
> mozilla takes forever.  There are also many other "All in 
> One" mobo's that are similarly priced with a socketA that 
> can be used with AMD chipsets.
> 
> Hope I helped answer your questions.
> 
> -Ben
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