Difference between revisions of "Talk:MythTV on Mac x86"

Revision as of 10:41, 29 September 2006

Page tidy-up

Isn't a lot of the information on this page redundant now, since 0.20 is out, and builds with additional patches? I think I'll try a tidy up in a few hours, if I've the time.

(tji) Yes, you're right. I cleaned up some of my stuff.

I've shifted a few of the sections around, and I was contemplating losing the 0.19 stuff altogether. Is anyone going to be building the older versions of the code? Particularly as there are some binaries that can be downloaded if you really need them. Also it seems to me that sometimes there's useful information on the topic that's stuck in this discussion page, that should really be on the page itself. What do people think? Bailey 10:41, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Plugin Support

How do you get plugins installed on this frontend?

(nigel) The osx-packager.pl script bundles up all the plugins that currently compile.

Mac frontend status / development discussion

• AC3 / SPDIF passthrough doesn't work for me (Core Duo Mini), I just get garbage audio if I enable this in the setup menu. I the code, I only see device initialization for PCM audio, no mention of AC3. I've tested some simple changes, with no luck.

• QT menus - Some menus don't show up well by default. The menu to exit the frontend is white text on light gray backgound -- which is unreadable. To fix this, change the "Qt Style" setting from Desktop Style to Windows in the Appearance settings.

• Core Video - A patch to add Core Video video output has been submitted. http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/2381 This may be able to take advantage of some of the more advanced GPU capabilities in the future.

Apple Remote Support

Just wanted to check if there has been any progess on making the apple remote work? Would it be possibly to some how use a different remote with the built in IR port with LIRC or something?

UPDATE: This is now possible using Remote Buddy

(kraney) I've created a patch that adds native support for the apple remote to mythfrontend. The patch and a more detailed description can be found in the mythtv trac ticket

(Bailey) The aforementioned patch made it into the 0.20 release, so the remote works out of the box.

Binary Packages?

Performance

(mmead) (file 3 above) Using a Mac mini intel duo core 1.66Ghz, I see ~85% CPU use by mythfrontend when playing 1080i with bob deinterlacing over nfs and ~68% when playing 720p over nfs.

(tji) With the release version of 0.20, I'm getting about 85% CPU utilization when doing 1080i video sports (full 60 fields/sec video). I get correspondingly lower CPU in other formats (1080i/24 filmed material, 720p, etc). I'll record more performance data when I get a chance.

(flaggz) I'm getting very choppy performance on a 1.66GHz core duo with the MMX enabled binaries linked below. This applies to both 1080i content, and scaled 480i content, which I found pretty strange. For comparison, the latest trunk builds of VLC play these same files perfectly over the network, so the machine is clearly capable.

Interestingly, if I turn off 'Scale Video as Necessary' in TV Settings->Playback, then the problem goes away, at least for the 480i content. There is a corresponding impact to the profile information that Shark reports. The difference appears to be the YUV422_UC_ToRGB32BitColorBGRA QuickTimeComponents function, which is the primary consumer of cycles in everything except the '480i, do not scale video' case. Checking/unchecking the scale video setting has no effect on the performance of 1080i playback.

(tji) Do you still get the scale video issues with 0.20?

(flaggz) It's a 1.66GHZ core due Mac Mini w/1GB RAM. The video hardware is the internal Intel GMA 950 that comes on the Mini. I only see the issue when my screen resolution is set to 1920x1080, which is weird because no scaling whatsoever should be required (it's 1080i material). I'm currently running at 1600x900 and the issue seems to be gone (performance is acceptable, but I haven't run shark to see if the YUV2RGB function drops out of the profile data at this res, yet). Obviously, I'd prefer to be at 1920x1080. tji and others, what resolution are you running on this hardware? Can you try 1920x1080 and see if you can reproduce what I reported above?

(nigel) The 1920x1080 material might actually be 1920x1088 or similar. They sometimes do that to make it divisible by 16 for the macroblocks or something.

(justin) I see very choppy performance at 1080i with file 4 on a 1.66GHz Core Duo mini. Turning off scale video as necessary results in much better performance, but standard def video becomes postage stamp sized.

Build Status

(tji) My current status:

• 0.20 Release:

Builds without any need for modifications, using the osxpackager.pl script. Performance is improved with the new mmx colorspace code, and the Apple remote works by default.

Front Row Integration

(~kraney) You can get the music on your mythbackend to show up in iTunes and Front Row using mt-daapd.

Macs also use DAAP to serve movies, but mt-daapd doesn't support that yet.

What would be nice is DAAP and DPAP support that get metadata from mythbackend or directly from mysql. It should be possible to get all of the myth music/gallery/video/tv content on the backend to show up directly in Front Row as 'shared' content.

Instructions for adding a "Front Row" menu item to myth are now on the Myth_on_Mac_x86 page.