<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 4/11/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Mark Kendall</b> <<a href="mailto:mark.kendall@gmail.com">mark.kendall@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
On 4/11/07, Chris Henderson <<a href="mailto:jchendo@gmail.com">jchendo@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>><br>><br>> On 2/8/07, Craig Partin <<a href="mailto:cpartin@gmail.com">cpartin@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
> > Can one of you who has this running give us an update? Does it make a<br>> > suitable frontend? Can you play any HD content? How does the video<br>> > quality compare to a normal frontend? Are there any drawbacks or
<br>> > gotchas?<br>> ><br>> > I am considering one as a frontend and would appreciate any opinions.<br>> ><br>><br>> I have to say that the one who must be obeyed asked me the other day if the
<br>> PS3 supports myth. Naturally i asked why, she answered "well if it does that<br>> would get the damm computer out of the living room, so you can have one"<br>><br>> so my interest level has increased dramatically!!!
<br>><br>> So i too would like to hear from people that have one running, with<br>> performance and usability etc.<br>><br><br>I've had mythtv running on my PS3 for a couple of weeks. Playing<br>standard def PAL at 720p is pretty poor due to significant
<br>frameskipping.<br><br>On the basis that all picture colour conversion, scaling etc is<br>unaccelerated (as it uses a straight memory backed framebuffer), I<br>decided to see how much that conversion/scaling costs. The answer - a
<br>lot.<br><br>So to cut a long story short, I've knocked up a PS3 video output<br>'driver' that hooks directly into the framebuffer memory and offloads<br>all the work to one of the SPUs (the supplementary processors on the
<br>Cell/PS3). It's early days yet but as of last night I had it<br>displaying an unscaled/greyscale picture with the main processor (the<br>PPU) running about 50-60% idle on each core.<br><br>Obviously I need to get colour conversion and scaling implemented
<br>first, but after that there are plenty of issues such as vertical<br>sync, OSD blending, pip, refresh rate detection, deinterlacers, xrandr<br>equivalent etc - and off course add 'Boot Game OS' to the exit menu
<br>options :)<br><br>Given a little time, I think the PS3 will make an excellent frontend<br>for SD playback. If anyone else manages to optimise ffmpeg for the<br>Cell (beyond me), then it should make an excellent frontend all round
<br>(i.e. HD mpeg2/H264 as well).<br><br>Regards<br><br>Mark<br></blockquote></div><br>Wow! It sounds like you are making some serous progress. I'm not really sure how <a href="http://x.org">x.org</a> video drivers work. Is your SPU video accelerator going to work with other
<a href="http://x.org">x.org</a> programs or only with mythTV?<br><br>I'd be happy to do some testing of your SPU video driver if that would help. Though the whole point of a game console is that a program will run exactly the same on every system.
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>_____________<br>Ryan Patterson