[mythtv-users] video card?

[John Pilkington]

On 10/11/2021 02:35, Stephen Worthington wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Nov 2021 16:36:30 -0500, you wrote:
> 
>> On 11/9/21 11:45 AM, John Pilkington wrote:
>>> But obsolescence looms.  This list for the 495 series driver doesn't
>>> include GT730 or GT210, and support for 470 in individual distros may
>>> vary.
>> I would like to point out that the open source nouveau driver exists.
>> https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html
>>
>> It may, or may not, support your cards.  If I understand correctly,
>> support is better for pre-Maxwell cards, which is when NVIDIA started
>> requiring signed firmware.  Because of their active hostility to open
>> source drivers, it is generally recommended to avoid NVIDIA GPUs.
>>
>>
>> While not discrete GPUs, Intel's Haswell and Skylake integrated graphics
>> have worked fine for me (with a 1080p TV).
> 
> The Nouveau drivers have historically not supported the Nvidia
> features needed for MythTV properly.  I have not tried them with
> MythTV for quite some time, so it is possible that has changed.  It is
> likely that if you use only CPU decoding and you have a powerful
> enough CPU, you would get good results.  The thing least likely to
> work is 1080i video (either MPEG2 or H.264), as deinterlacing is very
> CPU intensive.  If your normal TV is mostly 1080i, as it is in New
> Zealand, it is very important that the deinterlacing is done perfectly
> (at least for people like me who will see any defects).  Any Nvidia
> card (using its proprietary drivers and VDPAU or NVDEC) will produce a
> perfect result, with very low CPU use (and therefore lower power
> bills).
> 
> For those people who have H.265 broadcasts, that needs even more
> powerful CPUs to handle the decoding if done in the CPU.  But again,
> any recent Nvidia card will handle it with ease.
> 
> I have recently had to replace my laptop, and the new one has Intel
> graphics builtin (as well an Nvidia GT2060), so I should try it out
> and see how well it handles our H.264 1080i TV.

I notice that yesterday I sent this only to Stephen:  resending to list...

I'm coming back on this because I have just installed current master 
(776fe08) on my old 2-core HP box with the GT710 card and 470 series 
driver (mentioned earlier but with a typo) in Fedora 34.

With the VDPAU High Quality profile, VDPAU Acceleration and High Quality 
driver deinterlacing, playback and skipping responsiveness is excellent 
on the recordings that I have looked at.  They seem better than I have 
seen earlier, when I have usually used other options.  In some h264 
recordings from DVB-T2 there may be frequent changes between progressive 
and interlaced scanning, and I believe these have caused some problems 
in the past.  The new code handles them well, and plays energetic 
sequences from  HD 'Strictly Come Dancing' with cpu loads of around 2 x 15%

I think the most relevant commit was c5819a0.  Now I look forward to 
seeing this with the ffmpeg resync...

John P