[mythtv-users] My HDTV woes

Steven Adeff adeffs.mythtv at gmail.com
Mon Apr 3 12:00:11 UTC 2006


On 4/3/06, Jesse Guardiani <jesse at wingnet.net> wrote:
> On Sunday 02 April 2006 5:56 pm, Mark Lehrer wrote:
> > So, here's some info on my setup:
> >
> > > Pentium 4 3.00GHz w/ hyperthreading (64bit chip, but 32bit install)
> > > 1GB RAM
> >
> > This chip is nowhere near powerful enough to do HDTV.  Intel, in
> > general, is pretty worthless.  I recommend getting an Athlon x2 3800 -
> > that is the first chip I had that could do HDTV properly (my
> > definition of properly is playing back 1080i content with 2x
> > deinterlacing & at 1280x720).
> >
> > I tried a 3.2 GHz P4 and an Athlon 3500+ before, and neither was good
> > enough.
>
>
> :) I've got you all beat. I run an AGP nvidia 5200 via DVI -> Westinghouse
> LCD 1360x768 and playback 1080i with XvMC and my uber crappy $50 Celeron D
> 2.93ghz. I'm running 0.19-fixes revision 9591 from the 1st, and I'm using
> RTC for the timing since OpenGL Vsync is broken in nvidia 8178. If `top`
> is to be trusted (for some reason it lies sometimes on my IC7-G mobo) then
> I have 60% idle CPU during 1080i playback.
>
> I have just two complaints:
>
> 1.) I can't turn on Bob deint without a ton of problems. But my wife and
> family are blind to the interlacing artifacts anyway. And if I'm the only
> one annoyed then things are going pretty well. My gut tells me that this
> is more a problem with MythTV's code than a problem with nvidia or the
> CPU. XvMC + Bob works perfectly in Xine, for example.
>
> 2.) The rate of MythTV successfully tuning any given HDTV channel through
> my AverTV HD A180 DVB card in LiveTV is relatively poor. I had to move
> this card to the second card in my mythtv-setup so my family could watch
> LiveTV reliably on my PVR 350. This had the side effect of improving the
> HDTV LiveTV success rate a bit, oddly enough. For some reason Myth has
> an easier time tuning the card from the 'Y' button rather than entering
> LiveTV directly, but it still fails now and then. I'm pretty sure this
> is just a problem with MythTV and ATSC cards in general, and I suspect
> you'll have this problem no matter how huge your CPU until the code gets
> fixed.

Are you using OTA or QAM with your A180? I've got two running
alongside an HD3000 in QAM and PVR-150 and have had no tuning issues
with any of the cards.

--
Steve


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list