[mythtv-users] MythTV, smooth playback on 3ghz, and 1080i?

[David Rudder]

I have almost the exact same setup and my playback is fine.  I'm running 
on an Athlon 2600+, which is much less than 3HGhz.  I have an nvidia 
6200, but I don't think that makes a huge difference with 2D 
performance.  One thing you didn't mention is whether your recordings 
are in SD or HD.  Mine are in SD, which might make the difference.  I 
have a couple videos recorded off a video camera that are at 780x480, 
which are my largest, and they run fine, too, but nothing even close to 
1920x540 (which is the real resolution of 1080i).

One factor that was huge for me was finally getting Xv (not XvMC) to 
work properly.  TTYTT, I forget what I did, but I remember I got help 
from the mailing list archives.  I think I had to remove the "-zoom" 
option from mplayer, since that does software scaling.  I know for a 
fact that the videos were choppy with really poor playback until Xv 
worked properly, so that'll be something to try.

Try just running from a command line, like so
mplayer -fs -vo xv file.nuv
If that works properly, check your mythtv playback configuration.

-Dave

Rob wrote:

>Got a question for those of you running 3ghz processors [b]without[/b] XvMC
>decoding 1080i and deinterlacing successfully.  What is your secret?  I've
>tried 3 different machines with 3ghz (or close to it), and none of them come
>anywhere close to being able to do 1080i video smoothly in Myth.   I'm
>running Deban and have built Myth and have tried optimizing it for the
>processor I'm using and such, and it never seems to matter.    The OSD is
>the worst offender by far, when that is up it's jerk city.   1080i video
>sometimes managed to get by at full framerate and sometimes doesn't, it's
>inconsistent.   
>
>Now, I can enable XvMC and everything plays back perfectly smooth, but as
>noted by most FAQs, the OSD is in black and white, sometimes flickers badly,
>and causes the screen to jerk.  Once it goes away everything works okay.
>Most of the FAQs and posts I've read from people seem to indicate a 3ghz
>processor is plenty of horsepower to do 1080i without xvMC.  Why does it
>perform so badly on my system?   I think perhaps if I can find my
>performance problem even xvMC will work work better. 
>
>I apologize if this is in a FAQ or has been discussed ad nauseum, but I've
>been at this for over a week and haven't found anything.
>
>Video card is a FX5200
>Nvidia 7676 driver
>Currently testing with P4 3ghz, but have also tried Athlon 2800+
>
>Things I've tried:
>
>Open GL overlay (does this even work with NVidia drivers?)
>MPEG2Dec decoder (seems to make it worse)
>Various deinterlace modes - performance is just as bad with it "off"
>Sync to video
>Myth "stable" version 18.1 and the SVN head
>
>Any help greatly appreciated.
>
>  
>
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