[mythtv-users] XvMC and libmpeg2 to be dropped in 0.25

[Eloy Paris]

On Fri, Dec 03, 2010 at 11:04:57AM -0700, Brian Wood wrote:

> On Friday, December 03, 2010 10:34:14 am Steven Adeff wrote:
> 
> > Legacy hardware is an issue, but I wonder how many people are still
> > using it? My headaches with XvMC led me to suck it up and buy better
> > CPU's, then when VDPAU arrived, to buy hardware that supported that.

[...]

> I suspect many folks are like me, I keep pretty up to date with the main 
> backend machine, but I still have a couple of AGP boxes in use as 
> frontends. I've replaced one of them with a Revo (very happy with that), 
> but I don't want to spend $400 to make everything VDPAU capable right 
> now.

This pretty much summarizes my situation -- I am (was, see below)
depending on XvMC for one frontend that has an AGP bus and cannot decode
HD in software.

The XvMC migration has already started for some people -- Mythbuntu
disabled compile-time XvMC support in the latest auto-build packages
because of the number of crash reports that are apparently attributed
to XvMC. There was no heads up of this change in the Mythbuntu packages
because Mythbuntu developers assumed that there are few users using
XvMC. I found out that XvMC support was gone when my frontend wouldn't
playback anything.

At this point, given this situation, my options are:

- Build my own packages. Cons: there's a reason I use binary packages.
I don't really want to go and setup my own auto-build infrastructure to
keep on top of a -fixes branch.

- Try to find the last version of the Mythbuntu packages that have XvMC
support. Cons: I'll be running an old version that does not get fixes
from the -fixes branch.

- Buy a new frontend. Cons: was not planning on making the $$$
investment right now.

- Buy a PCI card that can do VDPAU. Cons: any negative downside to using
a PCI card to play HD? Based on the VDPAU in the wiki it seems like it
works. This seems like the best option I have right now.

Cheers,

Eloy Paris.-