[mythtv-users] A paradigm shift is coming. Are you ready?

[Yeechang Lee]

Bob Sully <rcs at malibyte.net> says:
> Athlon-64 Turion "4000+" 2.4GHz overclocked to 2.6

I dont have a good sense for how to compare your Athlon64 2.6GHz and
my Pentium 4 3.0GHz horsepowerwise, but I think your processor is a
wee bit faster than mine.

> I downloaded a bunch of those H.264 videos from the Apple site that
> Yeechang mentioned, and tried playing them using mplayer within
> Myth.  I figured that, based on the above, the results would be
> awful, using this single-core CPU...

Not necessarily; besides the possble horsepower advantage, I wrote
that on my system

    mplayer can play all the clips, properly handles the audio, and
    seeks better, but of course doesn't try to deinterlace by default;
    using -vf yadif=1 results in a flickering display and frame drops.

> I used this setting to play these:
> mplayer -fs -quiet -ao alsa:device=spdif -channels 6 %s
> 
> I almost fell out of my chair, because they all played beautifully.

To paraphrase Monica Lewinsky's ex-boyfriend, it depends on the
definition of "beautifully." As quoted above, my system isn't quite
fast enough to play the 1080p h.264 clips with deinterlacing (with
Yadif; if there's a way to enable Bob deinterlacing without
XvMC--which I can't get working--in my copy of mplayer I haven't
figured it out yet) in mplayer. I know not everyone counts
deinterlacing and frame doubling as basic necessities of life but,
after more than two years of enjoying 1080i content turned by Bob into
smooth 1080p 60Hz output, I do.

Besides, this is all a moot point; these not-quite-satisfactory-to-me
results are with mplayer and not the Myth internal player, which I
noted can't even play a lot of the clips.

This leads to something the conclusion of my original message was
driving at. Think about the thousands upon thousands of messages on
mythtv-users by people lamenting their inability to record
high-definition content off their satellite or cable feeds. Now, the
Holy Grail they've all waited for is here. Within a very short period
of time, quite possibly within three months, you and many others are
going to be purchasing the Hauppauge device for our MythTV setups and
said device is going to be producing native h.264 output.

In other words, as soon as within three months *the norm for
high-definition video content within MythTV is going to be
h.264*. Until now that's only been the case for a handful of
Englishmen within a few miles of an experimental BBC transmitter in
London. Now it'll be the entire MythTV-using world. And, suddenly, a
very large chunk of that world is going to discover that frontends
that have been happily playing 1080i over-the-air or FireWire-captured
ATSC MPEG-2 aren't going to be enough for the new age.

Me, I'm waiting on Kevin Hulse's promised report on how his
Linux-running Intel-based Mac mini frontends fare with the Apple 1080p
h.264 clips. If they can indeed, as he's claimed, satisfactorily play
them (and, hopefully, with Yadif, Bob, or Greedy frame-doubling
deinterlacers), I'll buy two of them to pave the way for the Hauppauge
device.

-- 
Frontend:		P4 3.0GHz, 1.5TB software RAID 5 array
Backend:		Quad-core Xeon 1.6GHz, 6.6TB sw RAID 6
Video inputs:		Four high-definition over FireWire/OTA
Accessories:		47" 1080p LCD, 5.1 digital, and MX-600