[mythtv-users] Intel hd 4000 support

[Stephen Worthington]

On Mon, 13 May 2013 14:54:23 +1000, you wrote:

>On 13 May 2013 13:18, Rajil Saraswat <rajil.s at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi
>> I am in the market looking for an uktrabook which is easy to carry around.
>> Most ultrabooks use intel hd 4000 graphics card. How well does mythtv
>> support it? Does it provide hardware acceleration similar to vdpau?
>> Tx
>>
>
>myth supports VAAPI hardware accelerated decoding.
>nowhere near as powerful and flexible as VDPAU (especially in regards to
>deinterlacing).
>
>The things to keep in mind, is that most laptop modern enough to have a
>HD4000, are likely fast enough to software decode anything you throw at
>them to start with.

I found that was not quite true - CPU power alone was not quite
enough.

I have had an MSI GT70 laptop since late last year: Core i7-3610QM
CPU, 12 GiBytes RAM, builtin HD4000 video.  There are few laptops with
more CPU power than that.  When playing back HD video on CPU alone, I
would often get a tearing effect towards the top of the screen.  I
never really diagnosed the problem, but I think it was only on 1080i
H.264 HD video.  SD and MPEG2 recordings certainly did not do it.  I
did try changing various options, but never found anything better. And
the colours were always a little off, a bit dark, and there was no way
to adjust the colours - mythfrontend did not provide the colour
settings I get on my main Nvidia based MythTV box.  The results were
certainly viewable, but just a little annoying at times.

When I tried VAAPI it worked for playing one program, but locked up
the display on exit from VAAPI - to get things going again I had to
swap to another TTY and restart lightdm and log in again.  But playing
the program produced a rather better result - correct colours, no
tearing.  And the colour settings were available, although I did not
then need them.

Then (a couple of months ago?) I ran across a post on this list saying
that Intel had produced an installer that installed the latest VAAPI
drivers and all the right matching packages, and they had VAAPI
working as a result.  So I tried that and now have VAAPI running
without any problems, although I have yet to test it in real life as I
have not been away from home with the laptop since then.

So I would certainly recommend trying VAAPI if you have problems with
just using CPU alone:


https://01.org/linuxgraphics/downloads/2013/intel-linux-graphics-installer

BTW My GT70 also has an Nvidia (GT650?) GPU, but current software to
access it from Linux (http://bumblebee-project.org) does not allow
VDPAU to work.  I am hoping that will change in the not too distant
future - rumour has it that there are changes coming in new kernels to
help.