[mythtv-users] OT: nVidia and XvMC?

[Mark Linford]

Hi, everyone:

This isn't strictly a Myth question, but it is related towards getting
my first system up and running, so I'm hoping someone has a similar
configuration, and could point me in the right direction ...

With everyone's help, I've gotten my Myth box to recognize my PVR-150
and my pcHDTV-3000 card, and I'm able to tune in stations through both
cards via my cable hook-up. However, I'm having trouble playing back
HD content. See, my processor is only a Sempron 2500+, so it really
can't handle decoding HD content by itself. However, my video card is
an nVidia 6200 with hardware decoding, so I should be able to offload
this to the card (in fact, this is why I bought it).

My problem is, it appears that I can't get my system to use XvMC. When
I enable that setting in Myth, I just get a black screen on playback.
Also, when I use mplayer -vo xvmc to play back any content (both the
version from atrpms, and a hand-complied version), I just get:

Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device

Not using XvMC (-vo xv) works, but the playback is so choppy that it's
unviewable.

I've gone over nVidia's docs, but I can't see any special option to
enable XvMC in my xorg.conf. All it says in its docs is that this
release (7676, btw) "includes support for the X-Video Motion
Compensation (XvMC) version 1.0 API on GeForce4, GeForce FX and newer
products."

So, for anyone with an nVidia card using XvMC, did you have to do
anything special to get it running? Any advice to point me in the
right direction would be appreciated. Thanks!

Mark