[mythtv-users] Best Hardware to exploit a nice TV

[Mark Wedel]

On 8/12/19 4:22 AM, John Pilkington wrote:
> On 12/08/2019 11:48, Simon Hobson wrote:
>> John Pilkington <johnpilk222 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Let me make another point:  I have always been sceptical about the benefits 
>>> of more pixels for many TV programmes, and store few HD recordings.  But I 
>>> just recorded a Prom from both BBC FOUR and BBC FOUR HD, and note that while 
>>> SD comes with stereo, HD says it has 6 channels.
>>
>> Mum now has a 65" Panasonic, needed a large screen as she has failing 
>> eyesight. I have tried switching between SD and HD channels and, especially on 
>> things like tennis and cricket, there is a huge difference. SD now looks 
>> blurry and has upscaling artefacts (mostly with motion), HD just looks so much 
>> crisper and the motion artefacts are reduced to the point where I don't notice 
>> them.
>> I don't know how much the motion & upscaling artefacts are due to the lower 
>> bitstream rate on SD, or the encoding, or the upscaling in the TV - but they 
>> are there and very intrusive for me.
> 
> OK, thanks for that.  I watch little high-motion stuff, and certainly the *LED 
> displays that I have seen have looked more vibrant on whatever content.
> 
> Demos are will usually be chosen to show what the set *can* do and the benefits 
> of the extra cost will depend on personal or family factors.

  When I got my first HD TV (plasma, only 720P), the picture quality between SD 
and HD was noticeable.  Even now, mythtv sometimes records a problem on one of 
the sub channels in SD, and quality difference is easily noticeable (though that 
may be related to compression).

  Back to the original question - doing a quick search of the A4-5000 APU, it 
looks like it has the equiv graphics of a AMD Radeon HD 8330, which has a max 
resolution of 2560x1600 (so less than 4K).

  However, you may have to ask where you are going to stream 4K content from - 
there is some out there, but it isn't broadcast (and I'm not sure there is any 
4K capture devices, so mythtv won't use it, though perhaps kodi might be able 
to).  But for mythtv, you could run at 1080P and be fine.  It is unclear from 
the original e-mail what the current output of the myth box is going to (resolution)

  Same point applies for HDHR content - what is the source of the content.

  Personally, I use a roku for most of the streaming services (though I'm only 
at 1080P now).  Kodi always seems like more bother than what I personally get 
from it.

  I'm not sure at this point how much work the cpu has to do for current mythtv 
playback, and how much is offloaded to the GPU.  But adding a discrete graphics 
card to an A4-5000 cpu may now move the bottleneck to the CPU (it seems to be a 
relatively slow 4 core CPU by modern standards (1.5 ghz) - that said, it is also 
a 6 year old APU.

  I suspect any new TV will have built in apps, so this may not be an issue, so 
you may be able to do most of your viewing through the TV directly.  But I guess 
it depends on what you watch - if you are watching 20 year old TV shows, they 
really are not going to appear any better.