Revision as of 17:34, 11 April 2007

This will be a hub to gather all info around using MythTV on the Playstation 3.

Current status

MythTV is running under YellowDogLinux with packages from atrpm. The problem: As others reported before: playback is choppy because XVideo is not available and MythTV falls back to XSHM for playback.

I have installed Gentoo on my PS3 to start experimenting with DirectFB. DirectFB 1.0.0 compiled cleanly. I rebuilt SDL with directfb-support, and compiled mplayer with directfb support.
Unfortunately, mplayer does not work with directfb or sdl, it always crashes at some point. I still need to figure out why. Though the test-program DFBPoint does work nicely. When run with --dfb:mode=1280x720 it entered fullscreen nicely, but some of the slide-animations where a little bit sloppy. I wonder if Mythtv would run smooth via directfb if there is no hardware acceleration.

I have now successfully emerged qt-embedded. After that I checked out the mythtv-vid branch and compiled it successfully. It even starts fine in fullscreen mode (1280x720), the menu is shown, keyboard works. Unfortunatly the mythtv-vid branch contains some changes from upstream and this made the mythfrontend incompatible with my backend running on my server (My Server has protocol 31, the mythtv-vid-branch currently 33) so i could not check how video-playback would run. However I made some tests with mplayer: When I just call it without parameters (no -vo=directfb) it works through sdl and that uses fbcon. It even scales to full 720p. However playback of HD-material is very choppy and not fluid at all. SD-material runs nearly smooth. Then I started the X server and used mplayer with the X11 driver. SD-material and material slightly over SD runs very smooth and great. Sadly the X11 driver cannot scale to fullscreen, which is very odd. HD-material (720p) runs better than under the console, but not even near the full framerate. Interestingly i heard of people running mplayer with Full-HD videos (1080p) under X and they said it was smooth as silk.

Information found on the web

For now I found the following interesting bits of information regarding MythTV on the ps3:

Framebuffer related

• First of all the wiki has dedicated page for using MythTV on the Framebuffer
  Unfortunatly this is a little bit outdated (mentions MythTV 0.19) so we have to look in what way this is still up to date
• Here is a Gentoo HOWTO for installing MyhtTV with framebuffer: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Setup_MythTV_in_Framebuffer
  This is also outdated but is a good base to start
• Here is a thread from small_frenchy who tries to get running MythTV on the framebuffer under Gentoo: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-3919197.html
  Although this is not directly playstation 3 related it provides some current facts about MythTV on the framebuffer.
• Here is a thread from the dev-mailiniglist concerning Qt/Embedded 3.3.8 with directFB 1.0.0rc4 and MythTV: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/dev/256098?page=last
  It has some useful information on getting the stuff compiled

General bits of information

• Here is a thread of someone reporting about having YellowDog Linux on the PS3: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/258573
  Not very informative, but who knows what will be replied to that thread in the future...
• Here is a task in the Myth-Trac which relates to a new branch (mythtv-vid) in MythTV which aims to work on the video-output of mythtv: http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/2287
  The MythTV in Framebuffer HOWTO mentions that this branch should be used when using MythTV in a framebuffer

Whats next?

Since I don't want to go SVN in my mythtv-network (one server, 2-3 frontends) i am stuck a little bit because I cannot try the frontend i compilde. Does anyone have an Idea on how to build a second mythbackend server with a newer version on the same machine as the real server and run them simultanously? Or could i run one in a virtual machine? But from where would i get some recordings to test video-playback then? Any Ideas?

Until I have a solution to the above problem, consider this project on halt.

Anyway I will probably test a little bit more with mplayer and see how i may optimize playback. Perhaps there are some workarounds to at least play back recordings in an easy and comfortable way. (UPnP and djmount come to mind)

I will report back when there is progress...