[mythtv-users] XvMC profile group playing MPEG4 videos?

[Steve Smith]

On 19/03/2008, Paul Bender <pebender at san.rr.com> wrote:
> Johnny Russ wrote:
>  > I have an old PIII 1GHz box that I use to playback SD shows and also my
>  > kids' videos. In 0.20 I used XvMC to playback my MPEG-2 shows and the
>  > default settings (whatever they were) on the internal player worked fine
>  > with my MPEG-4 videos. Since updating to 0.21 I haven't been able to get
>  > my playback profile setup such that I can playback my MPEG-2 shows and
>  > my MPEG-4 videos satisfactorily. With my hardware I can play the videos
>  > with ffmpeg, but using this for my TV shows starts to get a little jumpy
>  > if anything is going on (e.g. commercial flagging). However, if I use
>  > XvMC my TV shows are great with minimal CPU usage, but my MPEG-4 videos
>  > have issues (hanging, audio sync, choppy). I thought that XvMC would
>  > only be used for MPEG-2 streams
>  > (http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Playback_profiles)? I set up my
>  > playback profile such that XvMC would be used first, then ffmpeg would
>  > be used second. I thought this would cause my MPEG-2 shows to use XvMC
>  > and then everything else would use ffmpeg. However, with this setup my
>  > videos have issues. If I remove the XvMC or change the order of the
>  > profile groups then the videos are fine. It seems to me like my MPEG-4
>  > videos are using the XvMC profile group instead of falling through to
>  > the ffmpeg profile group. Am I mistaken about XvMC will only play MPEG-2
>  > content? Since the content all has similar resolutions, I can't make
>  > distinctions based on that criteria. Any ideas what is going on? Is
>  > there a way to use XvMC for only my TV shows and not for my videos?
>
>
> I believe that the issue is how the profiles are used. My understanding
>  is that once it determines that the hardware supports the decoder and
>  renderer for the specific video size, it uses it. However, if the codec
>  does not support the selection it falls back to another selection
>  without consulting the profile.
>
>  In your case, when it finds that it cannot use the xvmc-blit renderer to
>  play MPEG4, it fall back to the xv-opengl renderer. If this is your
>  problem, then you will see messages in console output from mythfrontend.
>  Therefore, if you run mythfrontend in a terminal window, then you will
>  see messages say that xvmc-blit is not supported by the codec and that
>  it is using xv-opengl instead.
>
>  For MiniMyth, I created a patch so that xvmc-blit falls back to xv-blit
>  (if present) and xvmc-opengl falls back to xv-opengl (if present).
>
>  There is a ticket (#4792) about this.
>
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>

Sorry, Paul never got round to thanking you for this! (Just like I
never got round to writing the patch itself ;-( )
So.........Thanks!

(BTW. Did the patch get accepted?)
Cheers

Steve