[mythtv-users] The state of trunk, vdpau, hd-pvr, etc

Greg Woods greg at gregandeva.net
Mon Jun 15 14:29:09 UTC 2009


On Mon, 2009-06-15 at 11:02 +0200, Marius Schrecker wrote:

> can anyone say what the current status is? Am I likely to encounter
> lots of problems getting it all playing nicely? I'm thinking
> especially about vdpau/x264 from the hd-pvr 

No one is going to be able to make any guarantees about the bleeding
edge code. There is no guarantee that the version you happen to download
might not have serious bugs. So at the very least, you have to be
prepared to "svn up" and recompile frequently. You also need to follow
the -dev and -commits list; nothing will irritate the developers more
than complaining about a problem that has already been fixed or is in
the process of getting fixed.

That said, I've certainly had good luck with trunk myself. My HD-PVR
works great. I even bought a GeForce 8400 card for my little Celeron
front end so that I could use VDPAU and watch the HD-PVR recordings on
it letterboxed, and that works great too. Once I got that working, the
WAF is pretty good these days.

h.264 playback is still not perfect though. I get a little band of
distortion rolling down the screen, that looks kind of like what I used
to see sometimes when all TV was analog OTA. I'm sure the cause is
different though :-) But when I reported this previously I got zero
response, so apparently this is something that doesn't occur for most
people. Also, time stretch doesn't work for h.264 recordings. It works
OK for a minute or so, then the audio totally goes south and sounds
jerky and crackly (and yes, I do have extra audio buffering enabled, I
can't play h.264 files at all without that checked).

In short, YMMV. I don't know about your wife, but my wife understands
about working with bleeding edge stuff and realizes that things may
break occasionally and not everything works 100% perfectly. But it is
very nice to be able to record all those HD channels that are not
available to my HDHomerun due to being encrypted.

--Greg




More information about the mythtv-users mailing list