[mythtvnz] Minimum CPU for FreeviewHD

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:16:33 +1300, you wrote:

>Hello again,
>
>Steven Ellis wrote:
>> I've got HD playback working on an Athlon X2 6000+ but it isn't reliable 
>> with occasional issues on TV3. The biggest problem is finding a CPU 
>> where you don't end up with your fan running at full speed
>
>Geoff wrote:
> > I'm using CPU only on 2 machines, both with Nova T-500's
> > 1st is a Core2 e7200 (2.54Ghz)
> > 2nd is a Core e8400 (3.0Ghz)
> > I thought I could get away with having the loop filter on for TV1 on
> > the 3Ghz box, but just isn't quite enough depending on the bit rate of
> > the stream that coming in. It's fine with it off.
>
>I noticed that we now have quite a few Athlon II x2s available in NZ, 
>which are based on the Phenom II core. My understanding is that these 
>have significant performance improvements over the Athlon Is.
>
>My hope is that, if an Athlon I 3GHz could nearly play 1080i TV3, some 
>of the new Athlon IIs would be able to play it properly. Steven, I 
>assume that you had the loop filter off to get it to work anywhere near 
>okay?
>
>If you look at some of the benchmarks, the new 3GHz Athlon IIs do look 
>better:
>http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=96&p2=28&c=1
>
>I was originally considering the 240e, but the 255 seems to have a lower 
>idle power (it is slightly higher on full), obviously has .3 GHz more 
>power and seems cheaper than the energy-efficient chips (only the 235e 
>is available here anyway):
>http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=114&p2=121&c=1
>
>Does anybody out there have one of the new Athlon IIs? It would be great 
>to know if the 240, 250 or 255 can handle TV3.
>
>Also, what's the current status of FreeviewHD playback in 0.22, as in 
>Mythbuntu 9.10? As far I can see from the samples, they work fine, but 
>my CPU isn't good enough -- I thought I read something on here though 
>about a patch that still needs to go upstream.
>
>Finally, does anybody know if any of the ffmpeg-mt patches have made it 
>into ffmpeg mainline? There doesn't seem to be any information available 
>except for the Git summary, which I'm not very good at reading. As far 
>as I can tell, only a very small amount of the decoding needs to be 
>multithreaded for it to work.
>
>Thanks in advance for your help,
>
>Aaron

I would think that everyone out there who is actually playing TV3 will
be using VDPAU on an Nvidia GPU.  I am unsure as to why you would not
want to do that too - it is the obvious solution, and works well.  The
GPU does not seem to be working too hard doing it, and the CPU
certainly is not, so the PC can run reasonably cool and not waste too
much electricity.  All we know about playing TV3 with CPU only is that
it does not work with a 3 GHz CPU when last tested.  We do not know
how much more CPU is needed.  There are some clues that the TV3 files
may have very high performance peaks, as I understand that they can
not be played across a 100 Mbit ethernet connection reliably - the
required bit rate peaks above 100 Mbit and they stutter at times.  I
have no problems playing them over my gigabit ethernet connections.