[mythtv-users] XvMC VLD playback looks green, blocky and uses too much cpu

[Ronald Pijnacker]

Hi all,
 
Following up on a thread I started a few months ago:

> This week I tried to upgrade my mythfrontend to mythbuntu jaunty.
> Running mythfrontend gives an error about not being able to create an XvMC Surface.
> The hardware I'm running on is a VIA EPIA M1000, the bug report can be found here:
> 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-openchrome/+bug/371512
> 
> Initially I filed a bug report under the openchrome video driver, but after
> a suggestion from the openchrome irc group, I ran xine with XvMC enabled.
> This worked without any problems.
> So the question now is, why I'm running into problems with mythtv. Any ideas?

It turns out that the "cannot create an XvMC Surface" is actually harmless, as
mythfrontend creates XvMC surfaces until it cannot.

Back then, I tried the following:

- updated openchrome

- added logging to the xvmc library to see whether and which calls were made on xvmc level
  xine and mythtv use pretty much the same calls, but xine runs < 30% and mythtv at > 80%.

- I even tried to bisect the mythtv trunk to see when xvmc stopped working, but a lot of
  versions just did not work at all, so I finally stopped that route.

- I tried the newest MythDora (because MythDora 4.0 worked where mythbuntu 7.10 didn't, I'm
  actually still running MythDora 4.0 now on my main frontend)

- I filed a bug report (http://cvs.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/6624), but that was rejected
  because it was filed on 0.21-fixes. 

At that time I'd had enough and my family too, so I decided to drop the upgrade and revert
to the previous (mythtv 0.20 based) install.

Refreshed after a nice holiday and acting on a suggestion on launchpad, I completely reinstalled
mythbuntu 9.04, enabled the weekly trunk build to see whether things improved over the
summer.

xine is still running at < 30% CPU but mythtv also still uses up > 80%. 
Unfortunately things got even worse, the video playback looks green now and very blocky.
In the mythfrontend logging it gives the message:

    [mpegvideo_xvmc_vld @ 0xb6e5aa20]Render token doesn't look as expected.

over and over again.

Any idea's what to do next?

Thanks,

Ronald