[mythtv-users] Building new Mythtv Box

Eric Sharkey eric at lisaneric.org
Mon Jan 10 21:14:25 UTC 2011


On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 3:10 PM, Joe <jfwd at phlobus.net> wrote:
>  my old onboard 6150LE, as
> pitful as many might consider that to be, works just fine when playing
> 1080i/720p content captured via HDHomeRun.  The LCD display I have
> right now on it is only a 32"/720p, but I used to have a 42" 1080p
> display and can vouch that it worked just fine on that too, driving it
> at 1920x1080 via HDMI.
>
> True that it's a cheap upgrade -- but I also don't see the reason to
> automatically blacklist a 6xxx based video card just because it's now
> unpopular... it works just fine for my setup and probably others as
> well.  Depends on your needs.  As far as I can tell the only thing
> VDPAU really buys you is better deinterlacing options, but that's also
> a personal preference thing.

Your mileage may vary, as they say.  On my main fontend/backend system
I had never been able to get VDPAU playback to work at all well from
within mythtv with either of two 8400GS cards.  I never had a problem
with mplayer, with or without vdpau, but I ended up turning off VDPAU
in myth because it was smoother without it.  My 3.0GHz C2D could
handle the 1080i content just fine.  For my 1080p Blu-Ray rips I used
mplayer as an external player.

My problem was that 720p content wasn't playable without extreme
performance problems leading to large numbers of dropped frames and
corresponding audio dropouts.

I initially tried to replace the second 8400GS with a GT220, but that
failed because I couldn't get the machine to boot with the GT220.  It
was literally taking about 2-3 seconds to draw one character on the
screen.  To get past the POST, I think it would have taken the better
part of a day and I didn't have the patience for that.  Recently I got
a second GT220 and had the exact same problem, only worse since it
seemed to lock up completely during POST.

What I eventually did was enable the onboard video as the primary
video card, but configure X to start on the GT220, and that works,
although I loose the boot up messages.

With the GT220, VDPAU works on all of my content and I can play
1080i/p and 720p all fine from within MythTV without needing any
external player.

I think the old hardware could have done it had the software been more
efficient, but it's water under the bridge for me at least.

Eric


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