[mythtv-users] xvmc on 0.19 and deciding between nvidia and s3 unichrome

[Andrew Kuan]

For whatever it's worth, HD content plays just fine for me with XvMC turned
on as long as there's no OSD and as long as I've paused for a few seconds to
create a bit of a buffer. What's unacceptable is that whenever XvMC is
turned on and there's any OSD overlayed on any content -- HD or standard def
-- everything gets stuttery and MythTV becomes difficult to control.

Anyway, it's disappointing to hear that you're still experiencing OSD/XvMC
problems even after upgrading to 0.19. Looks like it's option 1 for me after
all.

On 2/14/06, James Dastrup <jc at dastrup.com> wrote:
>
> > But then I threw the Fusion card into the mix and things stopped being
> > so clean. In order to view HD stations, I had to switch on XvMC and
> > aggressive audio buffering to get playback to work. But with XvMC on,
> > the OSD went black and white (as noted in previous threads) and all
> > playback, whether off the PVR cards or the Fusion card, would suffer
> > terrible stutter whenever the OSD was up.
> >
> > So I believe I have four options (some of which can be combined) and
> > was hoping people could offer their experiences before I spend the
> > money on what might be a deadend:
> >      1. Upgrade the CPU to, say, an Athlon XP 2800+ and leave XvMC
> >         off. The drawback I see here is that, even with a 2800+, HD
> >         viewing will still consume nearly all available CPU.
> >      2. Switch from a GeForce 4 MX 440 to a mobo with a built-in S3
> >         Unichrome GPU. I don't know if Unichrome does a better job
> >         with XvMC than nvidia or whether Unichrome will fix the
> >         stuttering problem when OSD is up.
> >      3. Upgrade to 0.19. The changelog mentions performance
> >         improvements but nothing specific about XvMC and OSD.
> >      4. Install a dedicated audio card rather than relying on the
> >         built-in audio on my mobo. Interestingly, when I was scanning
> >         for channels, I ran mplayer with the "-nosound" flag and video
> >         was always smooth. When I'd try running mplayer on a channel
> >         again with sound turned on, everything went to crap in 3
> >         seconds.
> > Option 3 is clearly the cheapest choice, but option 2 isn't far behind
> > (around 50 bucks). A question related to option 2 is whether or not
> > the picture quality with XvMC is better or worse than when XvMC is
> > left off.
>
> Same OSD problems here. #3 did not solve the problem for me.
>
> I'd still like to know if ANYONE is using XvMC with HD content and
> getting a perfect picture, OSD, etc. I'm hearing more and more that
> everyone is disabling XvMC.
>
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20060215/a47f2066/attachment.htm