[mythtv] Porting to Play Station 2

[Michael Kedl]

A command line player would be the patched mplayer.
It can run without X.

So it sounds possible to port at least a video decoder and see how that
would work.  But it sounds like using the PS2 as a generic front end
would be much more work than its worth.

Thanks for the info!  I may still think about getting the linux kit just
to play with it; but it sounds like I need to move the wifes old 550mhz
machine somewhere near the TV for my upstairs frontend.  I imagine it
can decode the video ok; I guess I'll find out ;-)

Mike

On Thu, 2003-01-02 at 18:45, Neil Trodden wrote:
> At 11:44 31/12/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> >Having not read your link yet (next to do :-)) I still wonder how much
> >RAM is available after you are sitting in X at a shell on your PS2.
> >
> >How can you say the RAM is not an issue if there is 8MB left of main
> >memory and the current Myth apps + decoder + buffers take 12MB?  I have
> >no idea what the actual numbers are though. So how much is left on your
> >Ps2 setup?  and maybe Isaac can tell us how much he thinks the player
> >needs.  (I assume you are right and "some" things can be swapped to
> >disk, but you wouldn't want much to swap; I would think you would just
> >kill off unneeded things to keep swapping down).
> >
> >Thanks for the reply!  What do you think about the Linux PS2 overall?
> >is it worth playing with?
> >
> >Mike
> 
> Sorry for the late reply,
> 
> I haven't used the kit for a while so I will get round to getting some hard 
> memory
> figures soon!
> 
> Under X, things are a bit slow. The general consensus is that running under 
> x is
> a pain. gcc is slow as are all applications. i386 cpus are, by design, good
> all-rounders for running many different types of applications. The emotion 
> engine
> is geared towards processing large volumes of geometric data and rendering it.
> For this it is very, very fast.  A recent demo, optimised for the ps2, renders
> 570,000 vertices per frame at 60fps. Stuff just has to be written 
> specifically to
> use the vector processors, the graphics synthesiser and the emotion engine.
> 
> The odd thing is that you talk directly to the graphics hardware so
> ps2 graphics programs run directly from the console (no x at all...). If 
> you wanted
> a full implementation of mythtv then it would be very slow if you used x and qt
> on the ps2. If you created a stand-alone player for pre-recorded shows, 
> using the
> ps2 as the "front end" then that might be more realistic. You'd have to ditch x
> to get any real performance so you'd need to re-implement the gui.
> 
> I wonder how hard it would be isolate the decoder part into a c command 
> line app,
> just to benchmark its speed at decoding? We could forget about the display 
> for now.
> Something like:
> 
> benchmark testfile.nuv
> 
> avg fps : xx.x
> 
> If anyone could give me a "point" in the right direction, I'll have a look 
> but I don't know
> a lot of c yet.
> 
> 
> Neil Trodden
> 
> 
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