[mythtv-users] Done with ATI

[Jarod Wilson]

On 08/12/2009 12:41 AM, Kevin J. Cummings wrote:
> On 08/11/2009 11:20 PM, Jarod Wilson wrote:
>> I'll buy that playback sucks with the radeon driver on the hd3xxx and
>> hd4xxx series cards, since the driver support for even the hd2xxx series
>> is pretty immature, but support for the X1xxx series with the radeon
>> driver is actually pretty good these days. I can play HDTV material just
>> fine using the Radeon driver with both an X1300 and an X1900XT. The cpu
>> in the system with the X1300 is just a dual-core 1.8GHz proc, and its
>> not working *that* hard.
>
> I have a Mobility Radeon X1600 (w/256MB) in my Core2 T7200 @ 2GHz, and
> playback (over 802.11g wireless) is blotchy and pixelated, whether its
> HD or SD, live or recorded.  Nothing is smooth.  I'm not sure where the
> bottleneck actually is:  video?  cpu?   wireless?   server?

Not sure. I have my 512MB X1300 in a dual-core 1.8GHz Opteron box that 
is currently serving as my backend. Just did some quick testing with a 
few different video clips, though for quickness sake, used mplayer, not 
mythtv... (I never actually use mythfrontend on my backend.)

- 1080i mpeg2 stuff plays reasonably smoothly, though it looks like it 
could use a deint filter running, or perhaps needs to be synced properly 
with the display refresh rate. Xorg using ~50% of one core, mplayer 
using ~65% of the other core.

- 720p mpeg2 stuff plays just fine, Xorg at ~20% of one core, mplayer at 
~55% of the other.

- 1080p h.264 Green Latern clip someone posted a little while back 
absolutely hammers the cpu, one core is maxed out by mplayer, the other 
is about 45% busy w/Xorg. Video is a bit choppy, but not horribly so.

- 720p h.264 clip from my HD PVR, mplayer pretty much pegs one core 
(~97% busy), Xorg has the other about 33% busy. Video isn't perfectly 
smooth, but at least watchable, would probably be fine with a bit more cpu.

This is all far better than the last time I tried seriously poking at a 
Radeon card, which was a 9200 Pro nearly four years ago, iirc, when the 
radeon driver, the fglrx driver and the 3rd option (gatos?) all failed 
to be useful, each in a different way. Oh, wait, I tried using this same 
X1300 in my old frontend box with the fglrx driver about three years 
ago, when the radeon driver didn't yet support it, and using fglrx led 
to an instant segfault and X crashing whenever you tried to use Xv for 
anything. But yeah, better now...

> (My server
> is an AMD 2600+ which has a Geforce 6200 video, and playback directly
> there is even worse, even with XvMC supposedly enabled.  Maybe I'm doing
> to much on my home server?  [httpd, sendmail, bittorrent, nfs {when it
> works}, ntpd, cups, ....] ).
>
> My "next" home server will definitely be VDPAU capable!  B^)

I take it you regularly watch stuff on the backend then?

>> That said, I'll still take either an nVidia or Intel video chipset over
>> an ATI chipset for a MythTV system.
>
> The nVidia stuff is certainly easier to configure and get working....

Well, my Radeon X1300 was supported right out of the box, no binary blob 
driver to install, and same when using Intel graphics. It all depends on 
what "working" is defined as. nVidia is definitely the best overall 
video playback quality though (when using their binary driver), even 
without VDPAU in the equation. Intel graphics served me reasonably well 
for quite some time though, and the Radeon situation has at least 
improved on the X1000 series.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at redhat.com