[mythtv-users] Mythtv playback problem with Nvidia FX5200 card / XvMC hardware playback / TV Out Quality

[Michael Cheshire (Mailing Lists)]

Guys,

For those of you who are always asking about video card quality - I was 
always an avant supporter of the PVR-350's video out, but have not ever been 
able to get it to play anything other than mpeg2 material which is very 
space inefficient. I borrowed an nvidia FX based card from work to test and 
after seeing the quailty of the TV-OUT (which is actually so close to the 
PVR-350's that I cant notice any difference).

So now I'm an NVIDIA tv-out convert :) so I can watch mpeg 4 stuff and I've 
been trying to get the nvidia XvMC acceleration working. Mainly so I can 
watch material recorded in HD with my Dvico FusionHDTV card - it doesnt seem 
able to keep up with the decoding without acceleration.

I as stated below by Jarod, the nvidia acceleration in the mythtv rpms will 
not work with 7167 - I've gone back to version 6629.

I'm using an nvidia FX 5200 card - my system is a Celeron 1.7G / 512MB RAM / 
MSI 845 Chipset Mainboard.

I'm having problems with mythtv when using XvMC playback, and am a little 
confused as to how / why XvMC works.

Video playback is stable when XvMC is off (but wont play HDTV material 
without pausing regularly (cpu is at 100%))

When watching tv recorded with my pvr-350 and XvMC is on, the video playback 
is very poor (lots of flickering, artifacts and it locks up regularly - I 
have to restart X to fix) cpu usage with XvMC is about 20%.  With XvMC off I 
get cpu usage about 30%.

When watching transcoded material (transcoded from mpeg2 -> mpeg4) - it 
doesnt seem to make a difference whether XvMC is on or off (cpu sits around 
20%).

This is strange - as far as I understood, mpeg4 encoding/decoding was more 
cpu intensive than mpeg 2?

Also there was no cpu difference between mpeg4 decoding with XvMC off or on. 
Doesn't mythtv use XvMC for mpeg4 playback or is XvMC for mpeg 2 only?

Has anyone run into these problems before - how did you fix them?

> Jaron Wilson wrote :

> > > Mar 25 23:09:39 mythtv kernel: NVRM: client does not support 
> > > versioning!!
> > > Mar 25 23:09:39 mythtv kernel: NVRM:    aborting to avoid catastrophe!

>> On Friday 25 March 2005 13:38, John Sturgeon wrote:
>> Wow... I was going to post the same exact error.  When I turned on
>> verbose messages from mythfrontend, I get this:
>>
>> Error: API mismatch: the NVIDIA kernel module is version 0.7167.0, but
>> this library is version 1.0.6629. Please be sure that your kernel
>> module and all NVIDIA driver files have the same driver version.
>> Unable to create XvMC Context return status:11 BadAlloc

> The ATrpms Myth package XvMC support is built against the 6629 nvidia 
> driver,
> looks like they need to be rebuilt for 7167, which will in turn will 
> probably
> break XvMC for those still using 6629, but such is life...