[mythtv-users] mythfrontend with radeon driver

[Dave Ulrick]

I'm a happy MythTV 0.26 (Fedora 19 with KDE) user who's pleased but a bit 
surprised that the front end is working so _well_ for me. The mystery is 
that my PC has an ATI video card that's driven by the Xorg 'radeon' 
driver. Judging by the mythtv.org Wikis, I really ought to be using an 
NVidia card with the closed-source NVidia driver if I want the best video 
playback performance, but in spite of the radeon driver's lack of 
acceleration features such as VDPAU I've been enjoying smooth glitch-free 
video.

At first I did see occasional video choppiness, but that's not been an 
issue since I enabled the RTC video timing method. I'm using the "normal" 
video playback profile because the high-quality and OpenGL profiles do 
give me some video choppiness. I've experimented with the ATI flglx 
drivers as well as an NVidia card, but I ended up going back to the 
ATI/radeon combination because it gave me the best combination of 
mythfrontend and non-MythTV desktop environment (KDE) video performance.

If my experience is any guide, it may be worthwhile for people with ATI 
video cards to try mythfrontend with the open-source radeon driver. 
Perhaps there's not such a need for video acceleration if the PC's CPU has 
adequate cycles.

Dave
-- 
Dave Ulrick
d-ulrick at comcast.net