[mythtv-users] Anyone successfully displaying 720p or above on a Pundit?

[Jerry Rubinow]

On 24/07/05, Scott <catfather at donpoo.net> wrote:
> 
> On Jul 24, 2005, at 3:40 PM, Jerry Rubinow wrote:
> > I'm also using the latest SIS driver from winischhofer.net.  Hmm, when
> > I play the pchdtv.com sample in mplayer, I get video of some people on
> > a train (and it's doubled horizontally so there are two images of the
> > same thing).
> 
> Yeah, it's interlaced or some such it seems. The picture quality is
> quite bad over all.

Ah, interlaced, that makes sense.  I don't have a lot of experience with HD yet.

> > When I play the same one within Myth, I get video of a
> > man and a woman singing, and it plays completely properly.
> 
> I assume you're using the MythTV Internal player to do this? I've
> never seen this 'other channel' you refer to from within xine or
> mplayer. I also haven't bothered to try the MythTV Internal player
> either. to the best of knowledge there is only one channel in the
> stream but I'm not sure how I would check it from mplayer or xine.

Yes, this was on the MythTV internal player.  I remember reading about
some utility out there that displays information about a transport
stream, but I don't recall what it is.

> > You say you had to abandon onboard SIS.  What did you use instead?  My
> > Pundit has no AGP slot.
> 
> Low end ATI 9200SE with DVI out and the Xorg 6.8.2 radeon driver.
> Playback is done with Xv. The xorg radeon driver has an Xv scaling
> bug where the right 1/4 side of the screen renders as a pink bar with
> 1920x1080 sources. I wouldn't recommend ATI cards because of this.
> 
> A small aside... The 1.0.1 version of xine-lib has a video option for
> the opengl driver called 2D_Tex_Fragprog that supposedly is as fast
> or faster than Xv on "modern graphics cards".  On my Pundit with ATI
> 9200SE PCI glxgears gives me a whopping 450fps which frankly sucks
> (yes, glxinfo shows direct rendering enabled and xfree logs show glx
> and dri loading just fine) which makes the new xine opengl playback
> perform like crap with any size video stream. I figure the bad opengl
> performance is a result of the slow PCI bus on the Pundit. As for the
> onboard SIS in the Pundit there is no opengl or dri support so all
> this is pretty much irrelevant unless you plan to put in a fast PCI
> video card. What might be really interesting is to see the CPU
> performance of a modern ATI card using dri and the opengl output from
> xine-lib 1.0.1 when playing back HDTV streams.
> 
> Getting back to the Pundit... My old SIS config was back on MythTV
> 0.16 with Gentoo 2004.x. Back then I was using xorg 6.7.0 and sis_drv
> v200804. I did recently try the current sis_drv with xorg 6.8.2 on
> Gentoo 2005.0 and saw the same video jump/sync issue that caused me
> to abandon it in the first place. To bad really since I liked the
> onboard better than I liked the ATI 9200SE. No, I don't have any of
> the old config files any more.

Ok, no ATI cards, which I'd heard before should be avoided.  I'm going
to try playing around with the troublesome transport streams a bit to
try to narrow down what characteristics about them are making things
hiccup (suggestions for what to try welcome), and if I can't figure
out anything I guess I'll have to figure out what might be adequate to
try in a PCI-based card with DVI-out.

-Jerry