[mythtv-users] H'ware playback, was:Myth on WD HDTV Media Player for $99

[Andrew Gallatin]

Brian Wood [beww at beww.org] wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 October 2009 07:52:52 Andrew Gallatin wrote:
> 
> > All my problematic files have these repeatable flags as confirmed by
> > an mpeg analyzer.  These problematic files are both 720p and 1080i.
> > None of my smoothly playing files (again, both 720p and 1080i) have
> > these flags.
> >
> > Thats' why I'm hoping for some Myth solution where hardware handles
> > the entire mpeg playback process, including decoding these repeatable
> > flags and handling audio sync, and software can't screw things up.
> > I was hoping VDPAU did that, but I guess it doesn't.  The BCM thing
> > is my next hope.
> 
> How "powerful" does a machine have to be to deal with these files? Today's 
> entry level machine is yesterday's screamer.

The dual-core atom I have feels much more powerful than the 3GHz P4
that I started using MythTV on in 2005, but it still glitches on these
files.  On the P4, in the worst case (720p), it was almost like
somebody was hitting ffw/pause/play a few times per second -- very
bursty motion.  The fastest machine I've run MythTV on was an iMac
C2D, and it still had glitches (using MythTV client for MacOSX), but
not nearly so bad.  It seemed roughly on par with the VDPAU Atom.  So
CPU power does help.  But the idea is to have a fanless, silent FE,
not throw h/w at the problem.

Drew