[mythtv-users] HD reference files?

[David Murphy]

Nick Morrott wrote:
> Perhaps an interim solution would be a simple script calling mplayer
> with a selection of 480/576p,720p, 1080i/p video, and grepping the
> dropped frames. This has the disadvantage of not using MythTV for
> playback, but it should be give a good estimate of whether a system is
> powerful enough for HD playback (SD playback is not an issue). The
> picture gets more complicated with the addition of MPEG4 HD content
> and its additional CPU requirements, but at least a user could get
> some comparable numbers.

I don't know if it makes good sense but I would think it useful to print 
out some basic information about the system configuration in general. 
Kernel version, relevant parts of dmesg showing cpu, memory, video and 
audio hardware, video and audio driver versions in use, perhaps 
xorg.conf options or something like that.  I don't know enough about how 
mythtv is built to even begin something like this but as long as I'm 
writing a wishlist it would be interesting to run the benchmark w/ 
combinations of of the tv playback settings such as xvmc, ffmpeg, 
libmpeg2, w/ kernel, w/ bob, etc.

I know in my case I found it surprising that xvmc used a lot more cpu 
than libmpeg2 on my setup--exactly the opposite of what I was expecting 
from  my research.  I usually just ssh into my frontend and run top 
configured to update every .25 seconds but as others have pointed out, 
this is not exactly ideal.