[mythtv-users] MythTV frontend + XVMC + AGP?

[Rich West]

David Schlenk wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 11:58 PM, Rich West <Rich.West at wesmo.com
> <mailto:Rich.West at wesmo.com>> wrote:
>
>     Yan Seiner wrote:
>     > Rich West wrote:
>     >> I just bit the bullet and upgraded all of my frontends to Fedora 10
>     >> (from Fedora 8), and I have found that I have to finally face
>     the Nvidia
>     >> bug (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=118738)
>     with NvAGP
>     >> breaking XvMC.  Ugh.
>     >>
>     >> I had been rebuilding the 100.14.11 driver (the last good working
>     >> driver) under Fedora 8 by applying a patch to it.
>      Unfortunately, under
>     >> Fedora 10, I can't get it to compile.
>     >>
>     >> I thought I would fight with the latest driver.  It looks like
>     the only
>     >> fix is to set NvAGP to 0, but the side effects of NvAGP
>     disabled seem to
>     >> be reducing the WAF (choppy previews of HD recordings (due to
>     higher CPU
>     >> utilization?), really really high cpu utilization and the resulting
>     >> video drag when skipping forward, backward, or auto commercial
>     >> skipping).
>     >>
>     >> I know this isn't entirely mythtv related, but I was wondering
>     if anyone
>     >> has had any luck with, possibly, compiling 100.14.11 under
>     Fedora 10
>     >> (kernel 2.6.27.19)?
>     >>
>     > There is a 100.14.19 driver.  You may need to fish around on the
>     beta
>     > site.  It should compile under newer kernels.
>
>     Unfortunately, all drivers newer than 100.14.11 exhibit this bug,
>     meaning that 100.14.19 is one of them. :(
>
>     -Rich
>
>
> I don't have anything positive to say, but I'm using hardy and
> newerish drivers with NvAGP set to 0 on an AMD 3000+ and 1080i works
> fine, but 720p stutters horribly. So far I've just dealt with it and
> watched 720p stuff on another front end, but long term I'm not sure if
> I'll attempt VDPAU with a PCI card or upgrade the mobo/CPU finally.
> XvMC support is so annoying. 

Argh.. this is the *only* problem I have ever had with nvidia.  Makes me
really re-consider my position in my discussion with Jarod Wilson
(offloading decoding to the video card vs doing everything in a powerful
CPU) since his position would eliminate the dependency upon the video
card driver fiasco. :(

I'm at the point of restoring my Fedora8 installations for my three
front ends and live with the MythVideo stuttering that I was
experiencing (my guess due to a mismatch of versions from my server and
my frontends).  Of course, Axel just dropped all F8 package support this
week, in the middle of my F8-F10 frontend upgrades (one day, I hope for
decent mirroring of that repository), so I can't even roll-back my
mythtv server install with any sense of ease (I can get the mythtv srpm
and attempt to rebuild it under F8, but he has so many dependencies in
there on his own packages that would then need to be rebuilt which
translates to a few days of trying to get the right build environment
set up).  Fortunately, I took dumps of the three installs, so rolling
back is a snap.

I'll have to look in to VDPAU.. otherwise, my choices are limited to :
stick at F8 and live with stuttering dvd video or upgrade the shuttle
boxes to something with pci-e. :(

-Rich