[mythtv-users] xvmc on 0.19 and deciding between nvidia and s3 unichrome

[James Dastrup]

> But then I threw the Fusion card into the mix and things stopped being
> so clean. In order to view HD stations, I had to switch on XvMC and
> aggressive audio buffering to get playback to work. But with XvMC on,
> the OSD went black and white (as noted in previous threads) and all
> playback, whether off the PVR cards or the Fusion card, would suffer
> terrible stutter whenever the OSD was up.
> 
> So I believe I have four options (some of which can be combined) and
> was hoping people could offer their experiences before I spend the
> money on what might be a deadend:
>      1. Upgrade the CPU to, say, an Athlon XP 2800+ and leave XvMC
>         off. The drawback I see here is that, even with a 2800+, HD
>         viewing will still consume nearly all available CPU.
>      2. Switch from a GeForce 4 MX 440 to a mobo with a built-in S3
>         Unichrome GPU. I don't know if Unichrome does a better job
>         with XvMC than nvidia or whether Unichrome will fix the
>         stuttering problem when OSD is up.
>      3. Upgrade to 0.19. The changelog mentions performance
>         improvements but nothing specific about XvMC and OSD.
>      4. Install a dedicated audio card rather than relying on the
>         built-in audio on my mobo. Interestingly, when I was scanning
>         for channels, I ran mplayer with the "-nosound" flag and video
>         was always smooth. When I'd try running mplayer on a channel
>         again with sound turned on, everything went to crap in 3
>         seconds.
> Option 3 is clearly the cheapest choice, but option 2 isn't far behind
> (around 50 bucks). A question related to option 2 is whether or not
> the picture quality with XvMC is better or worse than when XvMC is
> left off.

Same OSD problems here. #3 did not solve the problem for me.

I'd still like to know if ANYONE is using XvMC with HD content and
getting a perfect picture, OSD, etc. I'm hearing more and more that
everyone is disabling XvMC.