[mythtv] request: OSX mythfrontend and winmyth for CVS backend

[Jeremiah Morris]

On 27 Jan 2005, at 1:30 PM, Joseph A. Caputo wrote:

> (1) Is building for non-altivec (i.e., G3) working?  At one point I
> thought I was able to build on my G3 iBook by modifying config.h and
> config.mak, but I can't seem to with CVS as of last week.

I did make a bunch of Altivec changes last Friday, so I may have either 
fixed it or broken it unintentionally. Run "./configure 
--disable-altivec", and manually change settings.pro to read 
"TARGET_ALTIVEC=no" on line 120.  If it's still failing, send me the 
error log (either on- or off-list) and we can work through it.

>   I know you
> and Nigel have been working on incorporating all this into qmake, so
> I'll try tonight with your script and latest CVS...

The script doesn't yet have a non-Altivec option, so you'll have to do 
some tweaking if you use that. (Basically you have to get it to change 
settings.pro.) For now, if you're already set with the dependencies, it 
might be easier to just build it normally, like you have in the past. 
I'll try to get this fixed soon.

> (2) What is the likelihood that the frontend code will ever be tweaked
> to the point of being able to watch video via the frontend on a G3?

Not very likely, in my opinion. With mpeg2dec, I can just barely watch 
a 640x480 stream on my G4 450, but it still chokes on OSD blending 
(which is not Altivec optimized yet). From what I've been reading about 
video performance through VLC, MPlayer, etc. it's not just a Myth 
problem, it's just CPU-intensive work.

At this point, you might ask how a G3 can watch video from a DVD. 
Apple's DVD player accesses the motion-compensation and IDCT functions 
on the video card (the same thing that XvMC does), but there's no 
user-level API for this, so Myth can't use the same tricks that Apple 
uses. If Apple adds this API in 10.4 or something, it may be possible 
to speed things up, but it's equally likely that they wouldn't bother 
supporting the video cards from the G3 era.

- Jeremiah