[mythtv-users] Testing the HDTV Waters
Calvin Harrigan
charriglists at bellsouth.net
Sun May 7 09:22:48 EDT 2006
Calvin Harrigan wrote:
>matt mead wrote:
>
>
>
>>Calvin Harrigan wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>I've been using Mythtv with SD for years now. I've decided to try HD,
>>>there are quite a few OTA HD channels available in the area. I browsed
>>>through the list looking for minimum configurations needed to play back
>>>HD. The specs seemed a bit high. My current setup is an Athlon XP 1800
>>>with a FX5200 video card, 512 Megs ram. 360 gigs storage. According to
>>>what I've read, what I have is not powerful enough. But being stubborn
>>>I downloaded a couple HD clips. One in mpeg and one in wmv format,1080i
>>>and 720p respectively. Suprisingly enough both clips played
>>>flawlessly. I was blown away by what I've been missing with HD. The
>>>concern is that I played the clips using the mplayer from within
>>>mythtv. Is the mythtv built in player able to play HD as efficiently?
>>>The native format of the tv it's connected to is 1280 x 720 via
>>>dvi->hdmi. So the 1080i was scaled. Does anyone else have a similar
>>>low end setup that is using hd successfully? Is an 1800 just too slow?
>>>Any comments appreciated.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>First off, are you talking CPU model or CPU Mhz? I was capable of playing 720p
>>perfectly on an Ahtlon XP @1733Mhz, 512M ram, and an FX5200, using mythtv. For
>>1080i playback, mplayer would do it fine, but I would get the occasional glitch
>>in mythtv when the CPU was asked to do something else. CPU usage tended to be
>>around 85-90% for playing of 1080i using bob deinterlacing. The important
>>thing to note is that I was using XvMC. This was all with mythtv .18.1, and
>>XvMC worked fine with the 7xxx nvidia driver I was using at the time. That
>>said, I'm now running on the .19-fixes branch on much faster hardware (Athlon
>>64), and having to do software-only decoding with xv scaling. For the life of
>>me, regardless of nvidia driver version, I cannot get XvMC going with my nvidia
>>6200. With software decoding, I cannot get the CPU usage consistently below
>>92-95% with bob deinterlacing, though kernel and linear blend result in 50-65%
>>CPU usage for 1080i.
>>
>>I'd say give it a shot. I wonder if anyone has a script to "import" a file as
>>a mythtv recorded program. If you can find something like this, grab a real
>>mpeg2 stream and try it out:
>>http://www.eff.org/broadcastflag/LotRclip2-mpg.torrent
>>
>>This is a Lord of the Rings clip the EFF hosts a torrent for so you can
>>determine if your computer can handle it. WMV really isn't going to tell you
>>much in terms of whether your computer will properly handle MPEG2 at those
>>resolutions and bitrates.
>>
>>I personally think if you're talking 1800Mhz, you have a strong chance of
>>getting HDTV to playback adequately, assuming you can use XvMC. I wouldn't
>>expect the frontend to do much else, though, as it will likely cause stuttering
>>when it does.
>>
>>
>>-matt
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>1800 XP is the CPU model, I think the actual speed is 1533 or so. I am
>not sure if mplayer was using the xvmc capabilities of the card or not.
>I do not use xvmc in mythtv because it causes some strange behavior with
>the on screen display. this is with 0.18.1. I'm downloading the
>torrent you linked to above I'll see how that works.
>_______________________________________________
>mythtv-users mailing list
>mythtv-users at mythtv.org
>http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>
>
>
I was able to play the LOTR clip in mplayer using XVMC, it used about
40% CPU. It seemed to work pretty good. I'm going to give hdtv a go
with my current hardware. Thanks for all the input.
Calvin....
More information about the mythtv-users
mailing list