[mythtv-users] Nvidia woes

[DaveD]

The attached mail is an old thread, but I wondered what the status is of 
the "OpenGL-based approach" for Nvidia video playback.  Also, for the 
archives, I'd like to enumerate why I'm beginning to get really fed up 
with Nvidia:

When I started building my HTPC, I bought what I knew at the time; ATI.  
I went and bought the ATI All-in-Wonder and added an ATI HD tuner, which 
turned out to be useless as it didn't have QAM (which I had never heard 
of so didn't look for when I fell for their sales pitch).  I (naively) 
assumed at the time that Wondohs would be farther along in media support 
so I built an Athlon 64 3200+ AGP box and loaded Windoze Media Center 
(new at the time, 32-bit) and ATI's Catalyst software.

After a couple of month of trying to get MC to tune a channel without 
rebooting the machine and/or Catalyst versions that would actually do 
all it was supposed to without crashing, I tried Linux.  After I figured 
out how to deal with ATI's fglrx (wonder what that stands for?) driver, 
I made more progress in a few days with free software than I had made in 
months of screwing around with crap I had wasted good money on.

Next step was to get a monitor going where I could work on the computer 
and also have an independent display on the TV.  A little research told 
me Nvidia was the way to go.  So I bought an FX-5200.  Twinview brought 
me dual screens with Myth running in the TV screen and fully functional 
login on my monitor.  I threw out the ATI stuff (with celebration) and 
plugged in a Hauppage PVR-350, a PC-HD3000, and a DVICO Gold so I could 
get their IR remote (ask me about that in another thread!).

HD recording worked well and HD playback looked great!  I just maxed out 
my CPU.  HD live TV just wasn't quite working right.  I also had 
stability issues with moving the mouse between displays during playback 
(focus follows mouse).  It would cause the system to hang occasionally.  
So, I thought I'd get a "hotter" video card and bought a Geforce 6600.  
When I upgraded the Nvidia driver to drive it, I found that Nvidia had 
decided to drop support for their XV overly (WHAT!?!  This HAD to be 
something to do with marketing or evil conspiracies!).  It seemed to be 
more stable, but GREATLY increased my CPU usage and my 3200+ couldn't 
keep up.

Once again, lack of proper research led me to believe that Nvidia had 
only dropped XV support on their 6000 series.  So, once again naively, I 
bought ANOTHER Nvidia board (some 7000 model) which, of course, still 
didn't support XV!  (My gawd I'm gullible!).  That was THREE AGP boards 
(4 if you count the ATI) that couldn't do what I needed!  And, they are 
useless in newer, non-AGP motherboards (more conspiracies!).

So, giving up, I decided to upgrade my motherboard.  Thinking that I'd 
be better off dedicating a card to the HD TV display (1980x1080 native 
1080p LCD), I bought a dual core Athlon 64 4000+ motherboard with (of 
course) Nvida onboard video and a PCIE 16X Nvidia plug-in.

I obviously have too much money and not enough sense!  The Nvidia driver 
fails to properly remove itself when driving dual head causing the 
system to latch up every time I try to reboot, or otherwise get out of 
X.  I gave up on the onboard, dual head, multi-seat configuration I had 
worked so hard to achieve, disabled the onboard graphics, and went back 
to dual screen, single display running on the PCIE card.

The video works, live TV and all, but it looks like crap.  Low light 
areas of the HD display are blocky, like the color depth isn't there.  I 
know my old recordings are fine as they looked really good with the old 
legacy drivers that actually supported the overlay.  Xine and Mplayer 
all look the same as Myth during playback so I assume it's the Nvidia 
driver.  The current version of kernel/Nvidia I just upgraded to crashes 
the X server whenever it tries to use the glx extension.  Last version 
didn't crash but still looked like crap.  So I'm running without glx 
which works that dual core Athlon pretty hard.

Like I said at the top, I just wanted to post a record of how much money 
I've given Nvidia and how little I've gotten in return.  I'm probably 
doing something really wrong and living with frustration I need not live 
with but I've tried a lot of different things, none of which quite 
work.  I'm about to try going back to ATI.  Might as well discard some 
more hard earned dollars their way, too!

DaveD


Michael T. Dean wrote:
> On 08/21/2007 02:27 AM, DaveD wrote:
>   
>> What about the brightness/contrast adjustments?  This is something
>> that really bugs the hell out of me.  Why should we have to take a
>> giant step backward in functionality to upgrade to the latest
>> hardware?  There must be some way around this.  I would think that
>> Nvidia would provide some sort of wrapper so existing apps that rely
>> on the overlay would retain their functionality.  Mplayer, Xine and
>> MythTV (the ones I use, I assume there are others) all have this same
>> problem.  Anyone have a solution?
>>     
>
> AIUI, NVIDIA's recommendation is for applications to start supporting
> the new OpenGL-based approach (on which Myth devs, among others, are
> working).
>
> Mike
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