[mythtv-users] High end, state of the art Myth Frontend

[Andre Newman]

My Mythfrontend went pop, definitely no magic smoke left inside!

It was a C2D E4300 in an old EVGA Nvidia uATX board with a passive GT640, the graphics card survived but I'm doubtful about the CPU as the supply rail mosfets are very smelly.

So I need to replace it and in an antidote to the myriad cheapest, smallest, slowest, can I run it on a calculator threads… I'd like to investigate what is the very best option for a state of the art high end mythfrontend. There is some stuff on the wiki about de-interlacing quality but it doesn't feel very up to date, I follow the mailing list quite well and I don't recall any quality discussion beyond, does it stutter.

I've compared a few uPnP media player devices and I don't find the same video quality as VDPAU with Advanced 2x de-interlacing.

I do have a ~100" projection screen (1080p DLP projector) and I work in Sports TV so if there's an artefact I'll have seen it and it will have annoyed me. I have almost exclusively HD channels h264 1080i50 and bluray rips but I do get some sports stuff from the states for work which is mpeg2 1080i60, even sometimes glorious 720p60 :-))) I shoot my own sailing video material at 720p60 too, I'm hoping to shoot this at 720p120 next year with a new waterproof camera and new Projector.

I was very happy with the GT640 and vdpau although it doesn't ride through recording glitches very well and it can't play a lot of work material due to 4:2:2 coding or too high bitrate. Of course I use proper gear in proper studios but sometimes it's nice to review things at home or work from here.

The questions:

What is the current best de-interlacer for high motion (sports), is it vdpau advanced 2x or are there opengl equivalents? 

If Opengl is an option does it work well with Intel Haswell or Ivy Bridge integrated GPUs?

Is Interlaced output an option with any modern hardware? DLP & eyeballs de-interlace quite well.

Is ffmpeg decode as good as vdpau or better?
My tests suggest it's similar but vdpau has some subtle noise reduction and cleaner scaling of poor SD material, maybe there are parameters to pass through to ffmpeg to improve decoding?

How much CPU is enough CPU for h264 1080i50, 1080p decoding?
I suspect that a fast i3 is plenty and that more cores in an i5 is not so useful but??

I do have a i7-860 currently running the backend and a few other things which could get replaced but that does seem overkill.

All input gratefully received, interested to know what developers use too.

Andre