[mythtv-users] Unreasonably high CPU usage when playing HD content? Suggestions?

Jonathan Rogers me at jonathanrogers.name
Sun Apr 6 22:02:09 UTC 2008


On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 2:57 PM, Raphael <rpooser at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jason Keirstead wrote:
>  > Hi. No it is a "modern" one as I posted - a dual core AMD X2 6400
>  > running at 3.2 Ghz. It should have absolutely no problem playing h.264
>  > HD content- and thi sis not even that.
>  >
>  > I think it is the ATi video drivers myself. I am just wondering if
>  > anyone can verify this before I go buy a new card. Are the fglrx AVIVO
>  > drivers really THIS bad?
>  >
>  >
>
>  Even though ATI doesn't do XVMC, you still need at least XV or you will
>  get 100% cpu usage. Better check that. That cpu should certainly be able
>  to do 1080i, and probably will stay clocked low when displaying 720p.
>  If you're outputting via VGA or DVI, I found the "radeon" driver works
>  fine; only used fglrx for TV out.

I have also had better experiences with Xorg's "radeon" driver and my
Radeon 9600 (RV350) AGP card with an LCD TV plugged into its DVI port.
However, "radeon" might not work with newer ATI chips, which is why I
specifically bought the 9600 for the MythTV system. I have that card
in a system with an Athlon64 X2 3800 (2 GHz) and 1GiB of DDR RAM. That
system, which is a couple of years old, has no problem playing 19Mbps
1080i MPEG2 recorded from ATSC using the kernel deinterlacer (uses
less than 50% of each core) or 720P H.264 video in Matroska (MKV)
files (uses less than 50% of one core).

Jason, have you tried using mplayer as Sarah suggested? Sometimes it
is a lot less demanding than MythTV's player and it's good for
testing, since it spews lots of debugging output.
-- 
Jonathan Rogers


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