[mythtv-users] How well does Unichrome work?

Jarod Wilson jcw at wilsonet.com
Tue Nov 23 23:58:04 UTC 2004


On Tuesday 23 November 2004 14:36, Joe Votour wrote:
> > I'd been meaning to get back at you on this one, but
> > got held up by some
> > segfault issues along the way (discussed on
> > mythtv-dev), which uncovered
> > problems in the 11/16 Unichrome driver, and
> > incompatibility of some sort with
> > the very latest FC2 kernel (2.6.9-1.3_FC2).
>
> No problem on the delayed response, I was following
> the issues on the mythtv-dev list that you were
> seeing.  I'm running with 2.6.8-521.

Okay, cool, so you probably lost less sleep than I did while setting yours 
up. ;-)

> > Huh, I wasn't aware you could use deint w/this XvMC
> > variant... I'll have to
> > try that myself. I've still got my box hooked to a
> > monitor at the moment,
> > though it still looks really good.
>
> Well, I'm not sure if the deint is actually doing
> anything or not...  But I'm pretty sure that I'm
> actually using XvMC, because the OSD is black and
> white, and the options are checked off in the GUI.  I
> will be doing more looking into this over the weekend.

I'm going to tinker with mine some more over the long break also, but Isaac 
confirms that kernel deint doesn't work with XvMC on these. Bob deint does 
though. Out of curiosity, what sort of cpu utilization are you seeing while 
watching live TV and/or recordings? I think I'm around 55% total usage 
between user and system. Even more interesting will be mythvideo xvid 
playback performance, which I plan to get to over the weekend...

> > I actually finally got around to doing this myself
> > last night, watching the
> > same recording[1] across all three of my systems.
> > I'm failing to see what the
> > big deal with this ticker test is all about. :-)
> >
> > 1) perfectly smooth on my HDTV-connected box
> > (GeForce FX 5200 to
> > VGA->Component transcoder).
> >
> > 2) Perfectly smooth on my SVideo-connected 27"
> > Analog TV (onboard GeForce 4
> > MX).
> >
> > 3) Perfectly smooth most of the time hooked to a
> > monitor off the EPIA's VGA
> > port.
> >
> > The ticker on the EPIA would every once in a while
> > start to look a tad bit
> > choppy, like a few frames were getting dropped. If I
> > skipped back a few
> > seconds, upon resume, playback was perfectly smooth
> > again.
>
> Hmmm...  Perhaps the difference is that I was doing
> this in LiveTV mode...

In theory, that shouldn't matter. Bitrate and resolution could, I suppose. I 
record at 720x480, 8000kbps min, 16000kbps max. I can see the difference when 
watching on my HDTV, so rather than skimp on quality, I went big on storage. 
I should try some lower bitrate stuff. Could also be another ymmv case with 
nVidia cards and their output though...

> For the life of me, I couldn't 
> get anything working cleanly out of the GeForce 440MX,
> or an ATI, or a Matrox for that matter.  They all
> showed issues with the ticker.  It seems that if the
> ticker is smooth, then the rest of the picture is
> mostly smooth, which is kind of important for watching
> any kind of sports.

Definitely.

> Especially fast motion, like 
> wrestling (which isn't a sport, and it's value is
> debatable - but I was able to watch WWE Raw last night
> on the Epia, and it looked great - lots of fast
> motion).

I've been watching sports on my systems for ages without a problem, I guess 
I'm just lucky. :-)

However, I have seen some minor improvements with my nVidia cards since moving 
from the 4363 driver up to the 6xxx series. The flicker filter is great, no 
more needing to run a deint filter on my analog set, and the 6629 driver is 
definitely the best so far for driving an HDTV.

> > No capture card in mine, and no optical drive, just
> > a 2.5" laptop drive
[...]
> I think that's the route I'm going to go with mine.
> Get a 10GB (or smaller) 2.5" laptop drive, just enough
> to boot the system and give it some swap space (if
> necessary), and fetch the recordings and everything
> else over the network.  They'll come from my dedicated
> xmame machine.  :)

Yeah, mine's a 10GB, the stock drive from my 1st-gen white iBook. Plenty fast 
enough even if you wanted to drop a capture card in and use the drive for 
live TV buffer, while sending recordings to an NFS mount on a master backend. 
For those that care, MonarchComputer.com has adapters to use laptop drives 
for like $9.

-- 
Jarod C. Wilson, RHCE
jcw at wilsonet.com

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