[mythtv-users] mythtv and intel on CPU graphics

[Karl Newman]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 11:31 AM,  <kenkyee at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Karl Newman <siliconfiend at gmail.com> wrote:
>> You probably need mesa installed for the intel opengl drivers, and the
>> X11 driver xf86-video-intel. Also be sure you have OpenGL set as the
>> GUI renderer (or Auto should work, too, if your OpenGL is set up
>
> Wait a sec...you've got VAAPI working with MythTV????
>
> I think you're the only one that has gotten it to work.  Late last year
> year, William and
> I tried getting it to work and had the same symptoms as John is having now.
> I.e., if you choose the VAAPI renderer (not default, so you had to go
> through extra
> steps to set up a new playback profile) for playback in MythTV, the screen
> would
> go black and MythTV would bomb out (it never did a fallback to another
> rendered).
> I've been leaving it on the MythTV defaults and it's basically brute forcing
> playback
> w/ my sandy bridge 2500K in software.  I blogged about it back then when I
> thought
> I had it solved but didn't realize I had to turn on VAAPI playback in MythTV
> so I was
> doing software playback:
>   http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf/d6plinks/KKYE-8P95MH
>
> So to get yours to work, you had to install mesa which is basically opengl
> for the sandy bridge HD3000 graphics?  Then you tell MythTV to use OpenGL
> for playback instead of using MythTV's VAAPI support?  That would explain
> why you
> got yours to work instead of seeing the black screen crashes ;-)
>
>  ken

It didn't work right away. I messed with a bunch of stuff and
installed the newest package versions, etc. and it still wasn't
working, but once I got time to dig into it and look at the logs, I
discovered that setting the GUI theme painter (I think in
Setup->Appearance?) to Auto or OpenGL was the last trick it needed.
Somehow VAAPI is linked with OpenGL (not sure about the details). I
did set up a new playback profile with VAAPI and just used the
defaults that brought. I know it's not using software playback because
previously it was using around 35% CPU with the Slim profile. BTW, the
Sandy Bridge Core i3 has the HD2000 GPU, which I think is mainly fewer
pipelines and maybe some other differences which are insignificant for
me.

I'm using Gentoo (amd64), so mesa got pulled in by xorg-server. (mesa
version 8.0.3, xorg-server version 1.11.4-r1) I also have kernel
3.4.0-gentoo (a bunch of Sandy Bridge improvements went into that
kernel), libva-1.1.0,  libva-intel-driver-1.0.18,
xf86-video-intel-2.19.0. I think those are the key packages. Other
package versions may work but I haven't tested them.

When it wasn't working it never crashed, it just went black for a few
seconds and then exited back to the recordings screen with the "Video
frame buffering failed too many times" error message.

Hope that helps.

Sincerely,

Karl