[mythtv-users] HDHomeRun - Comcast shut off clear QAM

[Jay Ashworth]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Michael T. Dean" <mtdean at thirdcontact.com>

> > Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, Mike, but what's that thing inside
> > the video card? :-) Are you actually suggesting that you care which card
> > the processor chip is mounted on?
> 
> Not when VDPAU works, but since it doesn't always***, I still want to be
> able to watch what I want to watch, rather than what nvidia can handle.

Do you mean "VDPAU isn't guaranteed to work for all users who try it,
on the video card they have" or "VDPAU is prone to break randomly, even
on installations where it usually works, and is thus tactically 
unreliable"?

The former I can live with; the latter is a) unacceptable, and b) not
what I had come to understand.

> And that's the whole point--if all your eggs are in one basket, then
> you're limited to what the basket-maker (nvidia, Google/Android,
> Apple/iOS, app makers, ...) decide to let you do. I'm really surprised
> how many, "The cable company should let me use the content the way I
> want," people on this list have no problems trusting nvidia or Google
> or Apple or ... to allow them to do the things they want to do.

Well, yes, but does anyone think that NVidia can *remotely* downgrade 
my installed VDPAU capable card so that certain things will stop working?

They're not exactly the same problem, are they?

> *** Not only things like YouTube and other Flash stuff (and possibly
> more content people may have/want to use), but also even some broadcast
> MPEG-2 content (such as that from my NBC affiliate, received OTA--where
> VDPAU decode gives frequent (several per minute) bursts of blockiness
> and pixelization, but software decode (with VDPAU display) doesn't).

Indeed.

Well, the Circle Of Hardware drifts in and out of the CPU -- and certainly,
4 and 6 core AMD 5400s ought to have the CPU to decode HD MPEG2 on-chip,
especially if you can pin the decoder there...  But dedicated hardware has
traditionally been a bit cheaper than the general purpose stuff, or it 
wouldn't exist.  Having both options is good.

And the problem *used to be* bus bandwidth as much as or more than CPU
power; PCIe handles that nicely.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
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