[mythtv-users] vdpau worth it for hdtv?

[Brad Templeton]

On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 10:09:32AM -0800, Kevin Johnson wrote:
> If it is true that vdpau is less tolerant to errors, then that is a huge deal for me.  All my tv is ota, and I get some errors due to my distance from the stations.
> Can anyone else confirm this?
> 
> 
> 
> 

I would be interested in reports on this from others as well.  I found that with
vdpau the errors would cause a brief flash of the entire screen to noise while it was
better handled in the regular decoders.    However, I presume that this is not a hardware
thing, and that over time the nvidia driver or whatever is controlling the decoding
of the mp2 will get better at errors.

I also have noticed that vdpau is not able to play old videos I transcoded on the
system with the 8400gs over PCI bus.   They are super jittery, playing just perhaps
5 frames/second.    On my 220GT card on PCI-E, it plays them better, but still not
perfectly.   It may be necessary to code up a mode that reverts to non-vdpau
playback for certain codecs.    Or indeed, it might make sense to be able to define
a key which changes the playback method from one profile to another, so that if
you are playing a video that has lots of noise in the stream, or a codec that
vdpau is slow at, you can switch back to software encode.