[mythtv-users] Commflag and pixilation

Lan Barnes lan at falleagle.net
Sun Jun 10 17:22:20 UTC 2007


On Sat, June 9, 2007 7:30 pm, William Munson wrote:
> Lan Barnes wrote:
>> I have written several plaintive queries about pixilation when watching
recordings or live baseball games. This expresses itself as a squared
off
>> smear of block colors on rapid lateral panning or movement.
>> Now something interesting has happened. Somehow (sorry I can't be more
specific, but I'm a newb fumbling around) I have accidentally turned
off
>> commercial flagging in baseball. It still takes place in, for example, The
>> Daily Show, so I have no idea what I did. Maybe something stupid in
recording profiles. (If anyone can make a guess, I'd love to hear.) So
now I have to FF through baseball commercials ... BUT, the
pixilation
>> is gone.
>> My newb guess is that my CPU lacks the horse power to do both commflagg
and playback. For the curious:
>> [lbarnes at xena ~]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
>> processor       : 0
>> vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
>> cpu family      : 6
>> model           : 8
>> model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2000+
>> stepping        : 0
>> cpu MHz         : 1666.517
>> cache size      : 256 KB
>> fdiv_bug        : no
>> hlt_bug         : no
>> f00f_bug        : no
>> coma_bug        : no
>> fpu             : yes
>> fpu_exception   : yes
>> cpuid level     : 1
>> wp              : yes
>> flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca
cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow up ts
bogomips        : 3334.75
>> clflush size    : 32
>> So I would love remarks back on the possible validity of my guess, and
maybe hints on what I did to the comm flagging so I can turn it off and
on
>> on purpose.
>
> I dont know what you did to disable comm flagging on only the one
recording but a check of the recording schedule for that program will
probably show  the reason why. One big thing that could be causing your
pixelization is the real time comm flagging. That uses lots of cpu and
from what I have seen so far does not work well anyways. Change your
settings to start comm flagging after the recording finishes which is
the default mode. Another thing that I found helpful was to change the
hours flagging would run to start at say 1AM and run to 7AM. This has
the effect of delaying flagging until after normal viewing hours when
the machine is idle. If you decide to run the flagging after hours, you
can bump the number of flagging processes to 3 so that more programs
flag at the same time. Of course this means that if you like to watch
things the same day they record you will not have any commercial
flagging. Such is life with a pokey processor like yours. (Mine used to
be that slow but I upgraded to a overclocked 3000+Mobile and life is
better now.)
>

Thanks to all for the answers.

First the bad news. I lied to everybody (including myself). The pixilation
is still there. So we must consider the comm flagging a different issue.
I'm poking into it as I steal time.

(As an aside, there is a great deal of political pressure within the
family to not devote time to Myth. Everyone wants Myth and everyone wants
Myth to run better -- hue is poopy and Xv isn't working, comm flagging
ain't there for some things, I have not mastered archiving DVDs or
transcoding ... but everything else takes precidence and my Myth time is
openly resented. I suspect this resonates with others on the list, but
it's another thread for another day.)

On the timing of comm flagging, most of my recordings can stay in the can
for overnight, but with sports, my practice is to set games to record, let
them get maybe a 20 minute head start, and then start watching while they
record. The whole purpose is to let us jump the interminable commercial
breaks. FF is nice, but when the flagging was working it was way cool.

Many people tell me I have all the horse power I need for my two capture
cards because they have HW mpeg2 compression. I suspect the pixilation
could be fixed by deinterlacing but that means researching TV modelines
and bob. I've saved all the recent traffic on that, and will attack it ...
someday.

I suspect when I was poking around in the profiles I may have toggled
something somewhere. I am unaware of any recording category that would
treat baseball games differently, except maybe that something is smart
enough to ignore the program guide when recognizing dupes (there will,
after all, be maybe 12 games against the Dodgers each season, each
described exactly the same).

BTW, anent the political issues, I'm fortunate that my wife is generally
supportive of my projects and also an avid baseball fan. If this were
football season, I'd really be in the shi^H^H^H under a lot of pressure.

Don't know if there are any questions in this, so let's call it another
thank you.

-- 
Lan Barnes

SCM Analyst              Linux Guy
Tcl/Tk Enthusiast        Biodiesel Brewer







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