[mythtv-users] giving up on vdpau

[Daniel Agar]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 10:00, Phil Wild <philwild at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi people,
>
> I have given up trying to get vdpau going. Perhaps my issues are with
> my hardware but I just can't seem to get a reliable result.
>
> I initially switched to vdpau as I thought that my prebuffering pause
> error messages were cpu related and that vdpau may help - issue was
> resolved by bios and kernel change around HPET.
>
> I am using an Asus M3N78-EM motherboard, gigabit ethernet
> split/front/back config. The motherboard has nvidia 8300 chipset
> onboard.
>
> The smoothest and clearest vdpau result was using bob2x de-interlacing
> (to 1080p plasma display). Anything that would be considered better
> (from my reading) produced jerky video. My other issue with vdpau was
> that the audio was out of sync with the video. If I switch off vdpau,
> I don't have audio problems. Well actually, that is not true. I need
> to have extra audio buffering turned on, otherwise I get lots of
> these:
>
> WriteAudio: buffer underrun
>
> I have gone through the troubleshooting section of the wiki and the
> only thing I have not tried is replacing the onboard sound with
> something else.
>
> I expect I will buy new hardware in six months time when vdpau settles down...
>
> Cheers
>
> Phil

I have a similar board, the M3N78 Pro and I've only had good results
once I disabled frequency scaling, or used the "performance" governor.
I don't really understand why, as mplayer still uses < 10% cpu with
any of the HDPVR samples when it's running at 1GHZ.