[mythtv-users] RX 550 good card for MythTV?

[A. F. Cano]

On Mon, Jan 06, 2020 at 09:47:40AM -0600, Richard Shaw wrote:
>    No one has an option or experience with AMD RX 550?
>    Thanks,
>    Richard

No experience with the RX 550, but I've just succeeded in setting up an
i3-4130 (4 cores, 3.4 GHz) with 2 video cards and 4 screens.  The
built-in Intel graphics drive 2 and the Radeon 5450 the other 2.
I had to install firmware-amd-graphics.  Before that the card was not
seen at all.

At first Debian (10.2) only activated the first 2 screens connected to
the Intel video.  Even though the Radeon card was visible in the
Xorg.0.log and to various commands (see the thread in this list with
title "Video card recommendation sought." the monitors connected to it
were not connected or usable.  I finally hit the magic formula:

xrandr --output HDMI-1-1 --auto --right of HDMI-1
xrandr --output VGA-1-1 --mode 1280x1024 --right of HDMI-1-1

and all 4 screens now work.  The screens connected to the Radeon card
are called HDMI-1-1 and VGA-1-1.  The ones connected to the built-in
Intel graphics are HDMI-1 and VGA-1.

No mythtv yet on this machine, but I've just played a 1080p file on
HDMI-1-1 (TV connected to the Radeon card with an HDMI cable - I mention
this because even though one of the cards connected to the Intel graphics
is identified as HDMI-1 it is actually connected with a DVI cable, and
top reports CPU usage of 18-20%.  These files used to overwhelm the Liva
X.  It couldn't keep up and there were short pauses/hickups.  Debian
used smplayer to play this mkv file.

So it looks like Debian and xorg/KDE support this card well, even though
it was not detected and usable automatically.

Augustine