[mythtv-users] mythfrontend with radeon driver

[HP-mini]

On Fri, 2013-08-30 at 13:20 -0500, Dave Ulrick wrote:
> I'm a happy MythTV 0.26 (Fedora 19 with KDE) user who's pleased but a bit 
> surprised that the front end is working so _well_ for me. The mystery is 
> that my PC has an ATI video card that's driven by the Xorg 'radeon' 
> driver. Judging by the mythtv.org Wikis, I really ought to be using an 
> NVidia card with the closed-source NVidia driver if I want the best video 
> playback performance, but in spite of the radeon driver's lack of 
> acceleration features such as VDPAU I've been enjoying smooth glitch-free 
> video.
> 
> At first I did see occasional video choppiness, but that's not been an 
> issue since I enabled the RTC video timing method. I'm using the "normal" 
> video playback profile because the high-quality and OpenGL profiles do 
> give me some video choppiness. I've experimented with the ATI flglx 
> drivers as well as an NVidia card, but I ended up going back to the 
> ATI/radeon combination because it gave me the best combination of 
> mythfrontend and non-MythTV desktop environment (KDE) video performance.
> 
> If my experience is any guide, it may be worthwhile for people with ATI 
> video cards to try mythfrontend with the open-source radeon driver. 
> Perhaps there's not such a need for video acceleration if the PC's CPU has 
> adequate cycles.
> 
> Dave

Note that the FOSS radeon driver supports (a subset of) VDPAU & VAAPI on
some AMD h/w via the UVD engine.
http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/

KDE desktop settings allow composite effects redirection to be disabled
for full screen video apps like MythTV.