I'm currently running 0.18.1 on a Gentoo box running <a href="http://2.6.15.2">2.6.15.2</a> and ivtv
0.4.2. I have a PVR-150, a PVR-250, and a Dvico FusionHDTV5 Lite. I'm
outputting through a GeForce 4 MX440 to a 19" LCD screen. The box
itself is driven by an Athlon XP 2000+.<br>
<br>
The PVR-150 and PVR-250 work like champs. I had playback set up without
XvMC and non-buffered audio and playback was always smooth even with
both cards capturing 640x480 at 2200kbps and the box decoding and
displaying one of the shows.<br>
<br>
But then I threw the Fusion card into the mix and things stopped being
so clean. In order to view HD stations, I had to switch on XvMC and
aggressive audio buffering to get playback to work. But with XvMC on,
the OSD went black and white (as noted in previous threads) and all
playback, whether off the PVR cards or the Fusion card, would suffer
terrible stutter whenever the OSD was up.<br>
<br>
So I believe I have four options (some of which can be combined) and
was hoping people could offer their experiences before I spend the
money on what might be a deadend:<br>
<ol>
<li>Upgrade the CPU to, say, an Athlon XP 2800+ and leave XvMC off.
The drawback I see here is that, even with a 2800+, HD viewing will
still consume nearly all available CPU.</li>
<li>Switch from a GeForce 4 MX 440 to a mobo with a built-in S3
Unichrome GPU. I don't know if Unichrome does a better job with XvMC
than nvidia or whether Unichrome will fix the stuttering problem when
OSD is up.</li>
<li>Upgrade to 0.19. The changelog mentions performance improvements but nothing specific about XvMC and OSD.</li>
<li>Install a dedicated audio card rather than relying on the
built-in audio on my mobo. Interestingly, when I was scanning for
channels, I ran mplayer with the "-nosound" flag and video was always
smooth. When I'd try running mplayer on a channel again with sound
turned on, everything went to crap in 3 seconds.</li>
</ol>
Option 3 is clearly the cheapest choice, but option 2 isn't far behind
(around 50 bucks). A question related to option 2 is whether or not the
picture quality with XvMC is better or worse than when XvMC is left off.<br>
<br>
Thanks for any and all opinions!<br>
<br>
-- Andy<br>
<br>