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PostPosted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 11:42 pm 
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I noticed some frame issues using the "skip commercial" feature (I only have a only a 3 Ghz Intel P4) so I wanted to try the XVMC feature in the front end setting.

First trial I left the interlacing on and just enabled the XVMC setting (as I have a FX 5200 nVidea card). The results were 2 seconds of good live HD and then a crash which corrupted data on about all of my partitions (which was of course unrecoverable).

After a re-install I disabled interlacing and enabled XVMC again. Sure enough the video had a shaky start but it did not hang the machine... immediately, it did after switching to some other stations.

Even the video I was able see 'through' XVMC was looking blocky.

Is this normal (the blocky video) and does anyone run really stable with XVMC?


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PostPosted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 12:06 am 
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Location: Nashville, TN
Quote:
(I only have a only a 3 Ghz Intel P4)

then why in the frell are you messing with xvmc, I only have a p4 3g as well and can record two shows and watch a 1080i(the most demanding) hdtv program all at the same time. The only time I ever have problems is when I am commflagging two shows recording two and trying to watch an hdtv show. Not really even sure if xvmc would help that as it seems commflag is io bound not cpu bound.

If you are going to get xvmc working reliably you will need to make sure you have the latest nvidia drivers and make sure the libxvmc gets installed correctly.

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 6:00 am 
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Xsecrets wrote:
then why in the frell are you messing with xvmc, I only have a p4 3g as well and can record two shows and watch a 1080i(the most demanding) hdtv program all at the same time.


Because the video& audio were stuttering when I enabled commercial skipping (not just before and after the breaks as I could understand that).
The other thing was that I noticed flickering on one of the HD tv series.

I followed your advice a while ago and used the nvidea drivers that allow interlaced (so the older one), that could explain the crashes. I will try the latest drivers and switch down to 940x540.

I would still like to know though if the blocky video is normal with XVMC enabled.


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PostPosted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 10:47 am 
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Location: Nashville, TN
well if you are using a mode that requires deinterlace you will have interlace artifacts if that is what you are talking about, but I haven't noticed blocky video with xvmc. You can use bob deinterlace with xvmc, but that's the only one. none of the other deinterlace algorithms will work with xvmc.

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 12:28 pm 
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I doubt it was the result of the deinterlacing (it were blocks I was seeing, and black was presented as grey and black blocks), installing the 7174 driver for nVidea and switching to 940 seems to have fixed both stability and quality.

I wish I had the video I saw the stuttering on but because of the crash I don't, just have to wait and see what the result will be.

I would prefer any CPU offloading that is possible. I still need to look for a better CPU fan and the current one (standard Intel) makes enough noise to get me from the couch and increase the volume.

Still wonder what made my setup crash so badly that data on all of my partitions got corrupted. Yet it gave me the chance to install my new 300Gb HD for the recordings :D
Now I should have enough space to record all of the HD shows, my 2nd 3000 card is on the way and it sounds from your experience I should at least be able to record on 2 channels at the same time and perhaps even watch one of the recordings at recording time.


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PostPosted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 3:15 pm 
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Location: Arlington, MA
Block type pixellation is usually a sign of a corrupted MPEG stream. I've seen this in a number of circumstances. When testing HDTV I saw lots of it because of the amount of RF noise around here. I've also seen it while watching regular TV when the satellite feeds to the cable provider get interference (due to sunspots or satellite position). Finally i've seen it when the PVR-250 loses it's marbles due to bad firmware or heat.


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PostPosted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 10:08 pm 
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Location: Nashville, TN
yeah the stock intel fan is rediculous. sounds like a vaccum cleaner, and is actually louder than mine, so it was one of the first things replaced on my system.

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PostPosted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 5:16 am 
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Location: Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
I have found XvMC to work with 7676 nVidia driver, but as stated earlier, the OSD flickers when it comes over the TV picture. I have found when I disable this, the flicker goes away, but I get crap HDTV.

I generally put that down to signal strength as I am currently only getting 30% with the Linux drivers, so when I rewire my aerial I may get better.

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PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2005 4:42 pm 
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I have watched some recordings now with XVMC and checked whenever I saw any pixellation if the same would occur without XVMC.
XVMC does not cause additional pixellations with the later drivers.

I was about to give up on watching shows with and without XVMC until I came to the latest Supernatural recording. This was also the show I noticed the weird frame rate I reported at the start of this thread.

Without XVMC there were again some weird scene displays, its difficult to describe but there is a flickering off small light on black pixels (leaves on forest floor etc).
This was not the case with XVMC enabled, everything looked fine.

Since I did not trust myself I asked others and they see it too. Its not lack of CPU power (I checked with wmcpuload and wmmemload). Using XVMC reduced my cpu load from ~45% to ~22%.


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PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2005 6:42 pm 
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Location: Virginia, USA
I looked back through the thread and didn't see where you reported a frame rate.

Is your local WB channel broadcasting in 720p or 1080i? It could be scaling artifacts or deinterlacing artifacts or both.

Signal problems aren't so subtle: they cause the picture to basically fall apart--as others said, it's probably the "pixellation" you're referring to.

I've had good luck with XvMC playback, but (a) I never watch LiveTV via my HDTV tuners, (b) I don't flag commercials on HDTV recordings, and (c) I define "good luck" as being able to get through an episode of "Lost" without the frontend dying. So far I'm having good luck with Season Two...


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PostPosted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 12:46 am 
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Its definitely something with the interlacing. If I switch interlacing off the recorded Supernatural episode looks 'ok', some of the flickering/pixellation has gone. The KQED non HD channels however look terrible though as they still require interlacing.
I will need to find better screen resolution and refresh settings to resolve this or just keep using XVMC. Thanks!


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PostPosted: Fri Oct 14, 2005 9:45 am 
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I am using 6629 driver in interlaced mode. I found XVMC output at 1080i is near perfect, except "slow motion" when OSD is on.

My local OTA channel seems to always broadcast in 1920x1088, regardless 4:3 or 16:9. When I watch startandard channels captured by PVR250, I switch to 960x540 mode, otherwise the video quality is horrible, as somebody reported in nvnews forum.

In order to do the auto-switching correctly, I changed a number in source code:

/usr/src/mythtv-0.18.1/programs/mythfrontend/globalsettings.cpp

static HostSpinBox *VidModeHeight(int idx)
{
HostSpinBox *gs = new HostSpinBox(QString("VidModeHeight%1").arg(idx),
0, 1080, 16, true);
// Change "1080" to "1088". ATSC picture is 1920x1088.

With above change, all the time I have xvmc and deinterlacing enabled, I can't find significant issue with playback.


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 27, 2006 11:38 pm 
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Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 2:07 am
Posts: 1532
Location: California
Nonpro:

Quote:
In order to do the auto-switching correctly, I changed a number in source code


Are you saying that you have a way of automatically switching the output modeline/resolution based on the resolution of the input file? If so, can you post how you did this? I'd like to be able to swtich between my 1080i and 720p modelines based on the resolution of the recording, thanks!


Marc


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PostPosted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 12:17 pm 
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marc.aronson wrote:
Nonpro:

Quote:
In order to do the auto-switching correctly, I changed a number in source code


Are you saying that you have a way of automatically switching the output modeline/resolution based on the resolution of the input file? If so, can you post how you did this? I'd like to be able to swtich between my 1080i and 720p modelines based on the resolution of the recording, thanks!


Marc


I stopped doing this with Nvidia 8174 driver. Basically I created 2 modelines and "display modes" for 1080i and 540p. Using 1080i as default in xorg.conf. In MythTV setup using "separate display mode for GUI and playback". Once selected that option, a list of video size and display mode entry boxes came up. So entering the video size and desired display size here.

The annoying part of it was somehow the HDTV video size was 1920x1088. The entry box didn't allow value over 1080.

For video playback using mplayer, this video size has no effect and display is always in 1080i. I still need to use "-vo gl" option. XV output quality @1080i is still pretty bad.


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PostPosted: Wed Feb 01, 2006 1:06 am 
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Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 2:07 am
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Location: California
nonpro, thank you very much -- that was exactly what I was looking for! I now have things configured to automatically select 1080i display for 1920x1080 recordings and 720p display for 1280x720 recordings. As a result, I can now properly play both 1080i and 720p recordings with xvmc enabled.

I was having some problems with the front-end hanging during playback. After a bit of reading I see that the "real time" option can sometimes cause this. I just disabled the real-time option -- I'll see if I still have hangs after we've watched a few more shows.

Thanks again for your help!

Marc


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