[mythtv-users] Alternative to zbox for a frontend

[Paul Gardiner]

On 13/09/2017 00:59, Peter Bennett wrote:
> On 09/12/2017 06:22 PM, Paul Gardiner wrote:
>> That's useful to know. I'll see if I can find the commit in the kodi
>> repo that added that feature for the pi.
> 
> Before going too far down this road you may want to check whether the 
> performance of the Raspberry Pi is sufficient for your critical eye. I 
> suggest check what your TV scan rate is on the raspberry pi, then watch 
> a 25 fps recording and a 24 fps recording and see if there is a 
> difference on the raspberry pi MythTV.
> 
> A quick internet search shows you can change the video mode. Modes are 
> listed here:
> http://elinux.org/RPiconfig#Video_mode_options
> 
> The tvservice command lets you see the mode and change it. You can also 
> change it in config.txt. So you could see if changing it improves the 
> playback of the respective recordings.

Turns out I was misinterpreting what I was seeing. tvservice seems to be 
showing that the pi is picking up the 50Hz prefered mode of my tv. The 
problem is performance. SD runs perfectly, but with 1080i25 content 
frames are dropped - I'd guess about 1 in 4 or 5 because the result is 
so much like running at the wrong frame rate. Strangely some 720p24 
isn't quite perfect either although in that case it depends on the scene 
and some parts are perfectly smooth (that's with the screen mode changed 
to 24Hz).

I'm pretty sure I've applied every optimisation you list, besides trying 
greater than 256MB gpu mem. Perhaps I need to get a Pi 3.