[mythtv-users] ATI and VDPAU report (was: Which chips are VAAPI-supported by Myth?)

[Tyler T]

As an update to the earlier thread, I got my ECS motherboard w/ AMD
E1-2100 "Kabini" APU working with the F/OSS radeon drivers and VDPAU,
with 512MB RAM dedicated to video. I don't how well deinterlacing
works yet because I am still using an SDTV CRT.

Here's my recipe for Debian Jessie (honestly, it was way too easy).

apt-get install alsa-utils
[Add 'contrib non-free' to entries in /etc/apt/sources.list]
apt-get update
apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree
reboot
apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-ati mesa-vdpau-drivers xorg blackbox xterm
startx
echo deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org jessie main non-free >>
/etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get install deb-multimedia-keyring
apt-get update
apt-get install mythtv-frontend
mythfrontend

..and that was it (excluding some headaches getting my IR remote to
work). VDPAU shows up and can be selected in the Myth menus as usual.
I assume it's working as per the below 'top' grabs with delay set to
10 seconds.

Thank you to Nick Morrott and JYA for your help. At this point,
ATI+VDPAU is looking like a viable alternative to NVidia, which is
nice because I'm not aware of very many mini-ITX motherboards with an
NVidia chip built in. I have finally realized the goal I had back when
I first started using Myth years ago -- a small, quiet, efficient,
highly integrated frontend appliance. It's not ARM, unfortunately,
which means the hardware cost more and uses a tad more power than I
might like, but it's an acceptable compromise.

How well does this little dual-core AMD APU perform as a
frontend-only? Well, scrolling through my list of recordings doesn't
seem laggy (I realize that's subjective), and here's what playback
looks like:

Normal 1080i ATSC
top - 23:06:16 up 11 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.40, 0.43, 0.33
Tasks:  89 total,   1 running,  88 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  7.6 us,  3.5 sy,  0.0 ni, 88.2 id,  0.4 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.4 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:   1492376 total,   679084 used,   813292 free,    13768 buffers
KiB Swap:        0 total,        0 used,        0 free.   208184 cached Mem

  PID PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
  837 0 -20 5267668 373900  53724 S  20.0 25.1   2:30.90 mythfronte+
  633 19  -1  257308  54880  23608 S   2.5  3.7   0:24.21 Xorg
  948 20   0 1297248  10988   5428 S   1.3  0.7   0:10.42 mythlogser+
 1093 20   0   23500   1512   1104 R   0.1  0.1   0:01.15 top


2.0X timestretch 1080i ATSC
top - 23:05:36 up 11 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.43, 0.43, 0.32
Tasks:  88 total,   1 running,  87 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 13.0 us,  6.1 sy,  0.0 ni, 80.1 id,  0.3 wa,  0.1 hi,  0.4 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:   1492376 total,   677812 used,   814564 free,    13760 buffers
KiB Swap:        0 total,        0 used,        0 free.   208180 cached Mem

  PID PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
  837 0 -20 5267312 373512  53724 S  32.2 25.0   2:21.37 mythfronte+
  633 19  -1  257308  54880  23608 S   5.1  3.7   0:22.91 Xorg
  948 20   0 1297248  10988   5428 S   1.2  0.7   0:09.91 mythlogser+
    3 20   0       0      0      0 S   0.1  0.0   0:00.18 ksoftirqd/0
   42 20   0       0      0      0 S   0.1  0.0   0:00.39 kworker/1:2
 1093 20   0   23500   1512   1104 R   0.1  0.1   0:01.11 top