[mythtv-users] EPIA 600 Mhz goom performance

[Leon Verrall]

Hi People,

I've recently built a MythTV box with a VIA EPIA 600Mhz fanless Mobo (an 
ME6000 IIRC) and a Hauppauge PVR 250. Here's a summary of the setup:

* Debian Testing base OS.
* Debian Experimental XFree 4.3.0-0pre1v5
* Kernel 2.4.23 with XFS and the epia1 patch (from 
http://www.alterself.com/~epia/wiki/tiki-index.php)

* Precompiled XFree via driver for 4.3 from 
http://www.shipmail.org/%7Ethomas/

* Redeye Serial IR/IrDA transmitter (http://www.redremote.co.uk/serial/) 
to control a PACE NTL STB.

* libddmpeg.so from http://www.ivor.it/cle266/

* ivtv driver 0.1.9 from http://ivtv.sf.net. Firmware from 
pvr250_17_21288.exe.

* MythTV compiled from 0.13 source. ddmpeg and ALSA enabled.

 From what I can see this is a functional setup. The XFree via and via 
v4l stull loads correctly. DRI's working (glxgears gives about 200fps). 
xvinfo reports apparently sensible stuff.

But, I do have some problems. Hopefully someone can point out what I'm 
doing wrong ;)

1) I can capture from the PVR card OK (set at full PAL res, 25fps) but 
when playing that capture back (on another 1.2 Ghz machine) the video 
isn't at all smooth and loses sync with the audio very quickly. That 
machine is perfectly capable of playing DVD vobs back so I'm assuming 
the captured MPEG is dodgy. Does anyone have any PAL captures from a 
PVR-250 on the web I could download and compare?

2) Linking mythtv to libddmpeg (to get H/W accelerated playback) core 
dumps when starting to watch TV. When I look at the ivtv settings with 
test_ioctl I can see the size is set OK but the framerate is 1 which is 
odd... Here's the mythfrontend stack:

#0  CreateDriver () at io.h:48
48        __asm__ __volatile__ ("inb %w1,%0":"=a" (_v):"Nd" (port));
(gdb) where
#0  CreateDriver () at io.h:48
#1  0x401ea999 in VIADriverProc (wAction=4294967295, lpParam=0x0)
     at src/ddmpeg.c:805

3) The MuthMusic visualizations all seem to pause every second or so. 
Looking at top, XFree86 is chewing 50% CPU or so and tthere are 2 
mythfrontend processes eating about 15% each. It has the feels of a 
context switch delay or a maxed out CPU. Goom running fullscreen gies 
about 3-4 fps regardless of X size (I have 1024x768 overscan @ 24 bit). 
Incresing the goom scale factors to 2x2 doesn't help much (2-3 Hz 
extra). Even monoscope only hits about 10-15 Hz. Is this the sort of 
speed I should expect on this CPU?

Sorry for all the questions, but I'm keen to get my Myth Box up and 
recording stuff While I'm out.

Cheers for any help.

Leon.