[mythtv-users] Anyone running MythTV 31 on 32-bit x86 with nVidia card?

[Tom Dexter]

On 2/11/21, George Mari <george_mythusers at mari1938.org> wrote:
> On 2/10/21 11:56 AM, Tom Dexter wrote:
>> My trusty old frontend is a 32-bit x86 machine with a GT 430 nVidia card.
>>
>> Quite some time ago I upgraded to MythTV 30.0 but ended up reverting
>> back to 29.1 because I had some issues with some (though not most)
>> h264 videos. Specifically, some h264 videos would fail the VDPAU
>> decode and fallback to software decoding. These were videos that used
>> VDPAU with no issue in other players like xine, and also in MythTV
>> 29.1. This was never resolved and was an issue that apparently
>> couldn't be reproduced on 64 bit systems.
>>
>> My understanding is that the FFmpeg hardware acceleration code has
>> been radically changed in version 31.
>>
>> As per the subject, if anyone is running MythTV 31 on 32-bit x86 and
>> is using an nVidia GPU, it would help me enormously if they could test
>> this example:
>>
>> http://jell.yfish.us/media/jellyfish-60-mbps-hd-h264.mkv
>>
>> ...and see if it uses VDPAU decoding, which can be determined during
>> playback from the menu under Playback -> Playback Data.
>>
> I have a 64-bit Fedora installation with a GT 430 card - not exactly
> what you are asking for, I know.
>
> But for me, the video Playback Data shows h.264 ffmpeg
>

Wow. So it's NOT using VDPAU, and that's with MythTV 31? That is
really not good news at all. Do other h264 videos use VDPAU? That
sounds like a significant bug to me. Even on my 32-bit system that
video uses VDPAU without issues in xine, mpv, and in MythTV 29.1.

When I was temporarily on 30.0 I posted comments about this on this
(semi-related) bug, but at that time apparently nobody using 64-bit
could duplicate this one:

https://code.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/13223

As noted there, the error that caused it to fallback to software
decode was this:

2019-05-17 10:37:09.222935 E [14504/28060] Decoder
avformatdecoder.cpp:3785 (ProcessVideoPacket?) - AFD: video
avcodec_send_packet error: Invalid data found when processing input
(-1094995529) gotpicture:0

I'm hesitant to update, though I'm going to have to soon, as (for a
number of reasons) I can no longer compile MythTV 29.1 on my Gentoo
system. What's worse is that, since I'm running 29.1 I can't very well
log a bug or test any of this.

I'd be interested to see what others find testing this...with 32 or 64
bit. Thanks for the reply! That's significant for sure.

Tom