[mythtv-users] ION "LE" suitable for VDPAU ?

[Brian Wood]

On Tuesday 10 November 2009 20:51:18 Travis Tabbal wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 9:52 AM, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
> > On Tuesday 10 November 2009 09:45:14 Travis Tabbal wrote:
> > > I've since moved my backend onto a large server running in a VM. It's
> > > working very well. My Frontends are now very overpowered with VDPAU
> > > decoding the video.
> >
> > I take that to mean your capture devices are runing on a VM. Are you
> > using any
> > PCI tuners on the VM? I can see USB or network (HDHR) tuners working well
> > on
> > a VM, but I have doubts as to whether a PCI tuner would work or not.
> >
> > I have a large server with lots of excess capacity, if I could get PCI
> > tuners
> > to work in a VM (using Virtualbox right now), I'd consider moving my B/E
> > to that.
>
> No. I'm using an HDHR here, and if I upgraded I would add another one. I
> doubt PCI tuners would work with VirtualBox, but you might be able to get
> them working with Xen. They have PCI Passthrough in newer builds. You could
> always have the VM host run the backend and move other tasks that don't
> need direct I/O to VMs if you have any that would work well that way.

I thought abou Xen, but Xen requires CPUs with hardware vittualization, and 
this server is a pair of Opteron 275s, so that's not an option.

Running the B/E directly on the server iron under the host OS is a 
possibility, but I'm not sure I want to do that. 

Getting rid of any PCI capture devices is probably the best way to go. I have 
an HDHR, but unencrypted QAM is not likely to last long, and there's not much 
there now. OTA is limited to a single channel (CBS affiliate) here in the 
boondocks. We still have analog signals on the cable, so my PVR-150s are 
still useful.

The real problem is that I have enough hardware that there are just too many 
possibilities, and it's hard to chose between them.

Thanks for your thoughts.



-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org