[mythtv-users] he shoots. he scores!

[Niklas Brunlid]

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 17:13:55 -0600 (CST), Coax <coax at cornernet.com> wrote:

> Hello, Ivan.
>
> There is 1 good reason to not use the TV-Out on the PVR-350 for all 
> MythTV
> applications.
>
> Its framebuffer (i.e. that which is NOT displayed on /dev/video16) is so
> painfully slow, it rivals the first Trident PCI video card ever made. :)
> (It doesn't even seem to support XvMC extensions!)
>
> This means it is painfully slow to play anything that is NOT encoded with
> MPEG-2..
>
> I have a PVR-350 in my MythTV box (athlon "2200+", which is the 1.8ghz
> 266fsb chip...) and if I just so happen to disable hardware decoding - 
> and
> just out to the framebuffer directly, its like watching TV in 
> slow-motion.
> (Meanwhile, the box is absolutely flogged.  load skyrockets.)

Why do people keep saying this? I can guarantee that the hardware 
framebuffer on the PVR350 is plenty fast enough to play video in 
fullscreen, full frame rate. On my system (Pundit, P42.4GHz, 512MB 
somethingSpeed memory, MythTV 0.14, Gentoo gentoo-dev-sources 2.6.4-r1, 
Mathias' patched and ready-to-use 0.1.9a ivtv drivers) it simply works, 
and uses ca 20% CPU for mplayer software-scaled output, less for DVD with 
Xine.

As stated many times, once you have the speed, the problem becomes 
tearing, i.e. the players output is not synced with the PVR350:s output. 
Especially noticable on panning scenes or high-action scenes, but 
otherwise fine.

I honestly haven't tried using software decoding for PVR350-recorded 
content (at least not in MythTV) since I haven't had a reason. =)

Also, Mathias mentioned a patch that encodes video output to MPEG2. Could 
be interesting, haven't tried it myself though.

-- 
Niklas Brunlid