[mythtvnz] VDPAU OK on TV3, not elsewhere

[Nick Rout]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 3:57 PM, Steven Ellis <steven at openmedia.co.nz> wrote:
>
> On Mon, February 23, 2009 3:27 pm, Nick Rout wrote:
>> I have been helping a newbie get his DVB-T box up and running. I am
>> sorry but some of this will be vague until I ssh into his system again
>> tonight to get exact error messages, but I am looking for some tips in
>> advance as I don't want to miss anything when I have the chance to ssh
>> in.
>>
>> The CPU is some grunty quadcore monster and he has a EN9400GT Silent
>> 512MB video card.
>>
>> Its a fresh install of Mythbuntu 8.10 plus I have enabled JY Avenard's
>> stable repo and upgraded. [1]
>>
>> TV3 seems to run fine but every other channel  runs very badly [2],
>> being totally broken up (a bit like a video where the player is
>> struggling to find an I-frame). Sometimes a message comes up in the
>> frontend saying there has been a video error, sometimes it simply
>> freezes and won't respond to keypresses, sometimes it plays on for
>> quite a while, but badly. There is a stream of messages in the
>> frontend log but I didn't write them down at the time, hopefully can
>> access them tonight.
>>
>> Composite is disabled in xorg.conf and the output of
>> /var/log/Xorg.0.log seems to confirm it is disabled.
>>
>> Not sure if I got my playback profiles right - does anyone have a set
>> they use successfully in NZ with vdpau? (also where do I find these in
>> the database as I will be accessing by ssh).
>>
>> [1] I did encounter problems upgrading because of the shift of
>> libvdpau from nvidia-glx to nvidia-libvdpau, and in the end had to use
>> dpkg to remove the nvidia driver and then do the upgrade. But it is
>> all up and running at 180.29 now.
>>
>> [2] for the benefit of JY and any other people who may not be familiar
>> with the NZ channels there is a summary here:
>>
>> http://www.mythtv.co.nz/mythtv/2009/02/11/initial-vdpau-testing/
>>
>> In short TV3 is 1080i, the others are all 720p or 576i.
>>
>
> Thanks for the reference ;)
>
> Try a patched version of MPlayer first to see if it is a graphic card
> issue, then play with MythTV.

good idea.

>
> In theory TV1/2 should just work as they aren't interlaced, but don't
> forget "-mc 2 " for the interlaced channels.
>
> I've had very few issues with 180.29 compared with previous releases with
> MPlayer but I haven't tried on a 9xxx series card.
>
> Steve
>

By the way does anyone know what sort of symptoms one would get if
reception/aerial/cabling were below par? It strikes me that TV3 seems
to have the strongest signal in ChCh - it is certainly the one that
pops up most easily when I scan on my lappie in kaffeine.