[mythtv-users] Locks Up and Slow Performance

[Unit3]

Chris Pinkham wrote:

>When you play a video or watch TV in mythfrontend, it will print out a
>message saying either that it used Xv port X (X being some number) or
>that it couldn't find Xv support and is falling back to non-Xv mode.  If
>you see the Xv port message then Xv is in use, if you see the non-Xv
>mode then that would explain some slowness.  The non-Xv mode uses a
>lot of cpu horsepower to do the color conversion from YUV to RGB and also
>to do the scaling.  When using Xv, those two are done in hardware on the
>video card.
>  
>
Well, I did a lot of checking yesterday when I was fixing my audio 
problems (hooray btaudio and mailing list archives! ;) ), and it looks 
like XV *is* working fine, even if DRI isn't. I get messages like "using 
xv port 91" or whatever, so I guess that's not my performance problem. 
I'm starting to think it may just be the extra load of running Gnome 2 
with antialiasing, plus a dual monitor setup, plus MythTV, all on a 1.2 
Ghz Duron. I guess I'll just have to save up some cash, upgrade my CPU, 
and see.

On a related note, do other people see weird artifacting using the MPEG4 
compression? I get this effect where static elements will drift and 
blend into other parts of the frame (the OSD does this very noticeably), 
until what looks like the next keyframe is hit. Unfortunately, it 
appears to be only doing a keyframe about once every 4-5 seconds, so 
there's a lot of picture distortion while this happens. My thinking is 
that this is caused by my machine being unable to keep up with MythTV's 
encoding and decoding while using MPEG4, but I thought I'd ask if other 
people are experiencing the same thing.

Graeme