[mythtv-users] epia vs PVR-350 hardware decoding

[Tako Schotanus]

Tsk tsk, Isaac, I wasn't complaining. In fact how many people send
patches (albeit very minor ones ;-) for systems that they can't even use
properly?

I _do_ tell people what _my_ experience is. And it would be very
possible that if I have problems with it that other might as well. It
might also be that after months of fiddling, reading and writing mailing
list posts and after _repeated_ questions for details about using the
M10000 with PVR250 without getting anything that might be of much help I
think others might find them equally stumped.

Sure it _should_ work (which I can now say 100% sure because you say
that such a system works perfectly for you) but in the end people might
find it just as difficult as I do. Me "complaining" can only help in the
way that others can now point out that their M10000+PVR250 works
perfectly and offer help in setting things ups. So far no luck. Keeping
my mouth shut serves nobody in this case.

But let's get down to business: my system doesn't have a 100% cpu load
during display, that was months ago when still not using the VIA X
driver. With the via driver it's about 60% if I remember correctly, but
I can check again tonight when I get home.

Using 4.5/6 mbps as well and the picture looks just great. What happens
is that on playback the sounds starts to stutter, the more changes are
happening on screen the more it stutters (which is maybe suggests a bus
or memory speed/overload problem? not suree, don't know enough about
hardware limits and such). dmesg doesn't show any complaints from any of
the system's modules. (ivtv will show "not enough free buffers" errors
at times, but never when I'm watching LiveTV or a recording that
stutters).

This is the script I run before I start MythTV.

CMD=test_ioctl
echo "### Enabling PAL"
$CMD -u 0xff                    # 0xff = PAL, 0x3000 = NTSC
echo "### Enabling tuner"
$CMD -p 4                       # 4 = tuner, 0 = composite video
echo "### Setting resolution to 720x576"
$CMD -f width=720,height=576    # Full PAL res = 720x576, NTSC = 720x480
echo "### Setting framerates"
$CMD -c framespergop=12,framerate=1     # fr 1 = 25/sec
echo "### Setting bitrates"
$CMD -c bitrate=4500000,bitrate_peak=6000000

I know that full PAL resolution is maybe a bit much. I'll look at it
again tonight to see what the difference in performance is again (did
most of the tests already some time ago and can't remember all the
details) but I do know that I didn't look at it further because I could
hardly read the subtitles anymore. Going to any other vertical
resolution but 576 just wasn't watchable, sometimes everything jumped
around but in any case subtitles and other on-screen texts were just
unreadable.

So does anybody have any ideas?

Cheers,
 -Tako


> -----Original Message-----
> From: mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org 
> [mailto:mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org] On Behalf Of Isaac Richards
> Sent: dinsdag 5 augustus 2003 18:31
> To: Discussion about mythtv
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] epia vs PVR-350 hardware decoding
> 
> 
> On Tuesday 05 August 2003 12:18 pm, Tako Schotanus wrote:
> > Again? I've not seen any message before telling me that I've got my
> > system setup wrongly.
> 
> You're always complaining that it doesn't play well on your 
> system.  Works 
> fine here on identical hardware (~50% total cpu during 
> playback of 480x480 
> mpeg2 at 4.5/6 mbps), and on other people's machines.  If 
> it's using 100% cpu 
> for playback, you _have_ to have a configuration issue on 
> your machine.
> 
> Isaac
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