[mythtv-users] AMDGPU and VDPAU

[Tom Dexter]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2022 at 10:03 AM Martin Compton <martinc at itrans.com> wrote:
>
> On 4/6/22 16:49, Gregorio Gervasio Jr. wrote:
> > Yeah, my nVidia cards are even older so I switched away years ago.
> >
> > Two of my frontends use AMD Ryzen 3400G and 2400G APUs (CPUs with
> > integrated Radeon GPUs).  The playback profiles are set to use "VAAPI"
> > (not VDPAU) for the decoder and "OpenGL Hardware" for the renderer, and
> > that seems to work well.
> >
> > I haven't played much with the deinterlacing options since I don't
> > record any 1080i content these days ("Thanks, Comcast").
> I have a combo BE/FE with AMD Ryzen 7 5700G CPU/GPU Radeon graphics that
> I built late last year.  I set it to use VAAPI as that is listed as more
> broadly capable in MythTV FE System Status than VDPAU.  I have not
> noticed any issues with 1080i content (h.264 from an HDPVR), which all
> of my recordings use.
>
> It does seem to me that the picture is not quite as sharp as it was on
> my old machine (at 1080p60).  But without being able to specify the
> de-interlacer I'm not sure if it is related to that (or if it just my
> eyesight).  I drive the TV display at 4k p60 and like it overall.  Even
> if I used ffmpeg as the decoder, it doesn't put much load on the
> system.  Note that I am using the mesa driver's included in LINUX.  I
> have not tried installing the AMD GPU drivers.  I'm using Xubuntu 20 LTS.
>
> Remember that the AMD GPU uses system memory.  So the faster and more of
> it the better.  I've got 32Gb RAM and the GPU reserves 8GB.
>
> I've also noticed that MythTV FE starts using up RAM, upwards of 6-8GB
> over the course of days (using either ffmpeg or vaapi).  Not sure why it
> creeps up like that.
>
> Overall I have been pleased with the performance of the 5700G.  I really
> did not want to have to buy a separate video card and this CPU/GPU does
> the job nicely and was not a hassle to deal with in LINUX.
>
> Regards,
> Martin

Thanks for the reply! I'm a little confused as to what you're saying
about using RAM. Are you using the onboard GPU, or a separate video
card? I'm aware that the onboard cards use system RAM but didn't think
that was the case with a separate video card.

The 1080i content I have is from OTA TV for the channels that don't
broadcast in 720p. That of course is all mpeg-2. It seems a little
surprising that the h264 from that HDPVR would be interlaced actually.

When you say that you "drive the TV display at 4k" are you saying that
you're actually outputting 4k from the video card?

Thanks in advance!
Tom