It's been a very frustrating few days. HD playback with XVMC
sure is a mess.

It looks like I'm going to have to give up on getting the OSD
to work on my current hardware. HD playback (720p and 1080i)
works nicely until the OSD comes up. When that happens
everything grinds to a halt, until the OSD goes away. Often the
sound remains broken long after the OSD goes away.

The OSD will even break the sound on SD playback (though the
video continues smoothly the whole time). I've also been
unsuccessful in my attempts to find out what the "NVP:
prebuffering pause" message means.

Similar problems reported in the past seem to have been bugs in
MythTv, and I don't have the time to wade through that many
lines of C++ code to try to fix it.

So I guess it's time for new hardware. Not that there's any
gaurantee that will work any better...

_________________
Grant

There is a trick you can do to tell MythTV to use XvMC only for HD recordings. The SD recordings will use ffmpeg then.

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Xv ... or_HD_Only

This is what I did to get a P4 2.6 and FX5200 playing HD, and then set the OSD for as low as possible and live with the brief stutters.

I've been thinking about enabling that option. Too bad the big
three networks don't also broadcast in SD the way that PBS,
FOX, and the little guys do.

If the sound resumed when the OSD went away, it wouldn't be too
bad, but sometimes it takes several minutes for the sound to
come back on.

And now the frontend is just plain crashing quite a bit. The
last time it happend here's what was in the mythtv frontend
log:


I've also had problems with the GUI _sometimes_ not being drawn
at all when the OpenGL painter is enabled. With the Qt
painter, it seems better.

At least the TV-Out works with NVidia hardware -- which I can't
say was true for the ATI chipset I had before this.

The quality of video drivers for Linux is really pretty sad...

_________________
Grant

If you have an FX5200 you can use this hack which makes the osd color with xvmc. A side effect for me was the audio stuttering was minimized while the osd is displayed. Very tolerable after the hack.

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Xv ... 4_.26_5.29

P4 2.0 Ghz
AGP FX5200 using TVout
512 Meg ram

I tried that, and things got worse. Usually playback didn't work at all, and things just locked up.

_________________
Grant