[mythtv-users] Nvidia quarks, please explain.

[Gavin Haslett]

On Sun, 2005-07-03 at 22:36 -0600, Chad wrote:
> So, I am wondering what these quarks are, and if they are fixed in
> certain releases of nvidia drivers, and most importantly, does XvMC
> really take that much load off the processor?

Personally, I think it's a lot of version control, hardware specific
quirks and just too many things to consider to really get a hard answer.

I have two frontends at home, one is dedicated and the other is not.
I've had inconsistent results with XvMC on the non-dedicated frontend to
the point that I've stopped using it. It would even lock the machine
hard (they both have identical video cards FYI, both Fedora Core 3 and
both updated synchronously to the latest files every week). The only
difference between these boxes is hardware. Now, since live TV playback
still doesn't chow down much more than 25-30% CPU on my 933, I just
dropped XvMC and it's been nice and stable.

My dedicated box OTOH has been running XvMC flawlessly. Generic
motherboard and an AMD 800 CPU. My frontend *peaks* at about 14% CPU
utilization on a normal basis with the latest RPM's of Myth 0.18. It
works damned well, despite the flickering OSD which is only a minor nit-
pick.

Baically, I think that the XvMC is hit and miss only because of
hardware, I think generally it works pretty well but some combinations
of hardware and software just don't seem to cut it. I don't know the
reasons why.

Gavin