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PostPosted: Sun Sep 27, 2009 11:12 pm 
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Location: Salem, MA
I recently upgraded from R5F27 to R6 and part of that installation included an upgrade to MythTV as well. I am new to the Playback Profiles that were added at some point to MythTV.

My playback of HD videos appears to be worse to me in R6 than it was in R5F27.

What is the best Playback Profile for an AMD Athlon X2 3800+ and 1GB of RAM? Is it time for me to upgrade my machine for better HD performance?

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PostPosted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 7:36 am 
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How are you outputting to your TV?

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[MBE] SilverStone LC-10 HTPC Case, Asus M2NPV-VM, AMD X2 4200+, 1G RAM, Nvidia 9500 PCIe, PVR500 and a HD-PVR - Rockin VDPAU


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PostPosted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 7:48 am 
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Location: Arlington, VA, USA
Also important: what kind of video card does that machine have? And what kind of HD is it (720p, 1080i, etc.)?

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PostPosted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 8:21 am 
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Location: Salem, MA
I'm not sure what the video output is. It's either 720p or 1080i as it's QAM cable.

I'm using the video card built into my motherboard which is an ASUS M2NPV-VM so the video is a GeForce 6150.

I am using a DVI to HDMI cable to get from the video out on the motherboard to the TV.

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PostPosted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 6:41 pm 
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Clear QAM would be your input your output would be in MPEG2 at either 720P, 1080i, or 1080p.

My first piece of advice would be to replace the onboard video with a new video card. I bought an nivida 9500 chipset with 512 RAM and installed it in my MoBo (which is the same as yours). The 6150 just doesnt have the balls needed for the higher resolutions.. The next version of LinHES will be myth .22 which supports VDPAU (technology evolution past XVMC) and will fully utilize that fancy new card. I'm running .22 now and 1080p video uses about 5-10% cpu, pretty impressive.

If you cant add a new video card, using the profiles set your profile to use XVMC for most of the video output. You'll have to play with deinterlacers to get it right.

Ether..

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PostPosted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 7:25 pm 
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Location: Arlington, MA
I wrote up something along these lines back when I got my new TV. It was on R5.5 but it's an area of the config that hasn't changed that much in R6. You may find that you also have a mix of 1080i, 720p, and various 480i resolutions. Look for a post by me under Tier 1 Hardware back in early spring.

Oh, and R6 may choose an older video driver on you (there's already a fly spray ticket). Check the X log file to see what it's using.


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PostPosted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 7:32 pm 
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Location: Salem, MA
Cool, thanks for the suggestions, guys. I'll check the X log and look into the video card.

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PostPosted: Wed Sep 30, 2009 9:11 pm 
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Location: Salem, MA
It looks like I am running an old driver:

Code:
NVIDIA dlloader X Driver  96.43.09


Are there instructions on how to upgrade this driver? What should I upgrade to?

I went ahead and ordered an nVidia 9500, will I have to upgrade the drivers for that card as well?

Thanks!

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PostPosted: Thu Oct 01, 2009 7:06 am 
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Location: Arlington, VA, USA
I actually just got an nVidia GeForce 6200 for my main machine, to replace its aging GeForce 4 MX (and to make that card available for a second machine).

Apparently the 6200 runs on both the older nvidia-96xx drivers, as well as the new nvidia drivers (v. 185.18.36), since I swapped the old card out for the new one, and everything worked still using the old drivers.

Out of curiosity, I installed the new drivers ("nvidia" package), and I immediately found that my HD performance was worse. Reverting back to the nvidia-96xx package gave me better HD performance. My testing was not at all extensive (I just tried playing the 1080p MPEG-4 AVI Big Buck Bunny), but under the new drivers it was halting every few seconds, whereas under the old drivers it halted maybe 6 times in the course of a few minutes. I also didn't try any tweaking of settings.

If you want to install the new drivers (you can always go back to the older ones), it's just a matter of removing the old ones, installing the new ones, and rebooting (or maybe you could also just restart X). Should be something like

$ sudo pacman -Sy nvidia

There are some recursive dependencies though, so I think I had to remove nvidia-96xx using "pacman -Rc" or "pacman -Rs" first, then try to install nvidia.

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PostPosted: Thu Oct 01, 2009 8:39 pm 
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Location: Arlington, MA
If you install the newer drivers there are some X settings that are absolute musts. I tried to cover that in both the hints and my recent display related posts.

This one includes a bunch of details about switching to a HD configuration: http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=19668

This one includes details of setting up multiple output modes and configuring the front end to use the appropriate one for your content: http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=19913

This one includes a discussion of how to convert your xorg.conf for HDTV and shows how mine is set up: http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=19323


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PostPosted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 10:11 am 
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Thanks for the info, tjc. I just want to verify, all those links refer to R6 as well? Thanks.

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PostPosted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 9:15 pm 
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Yes. The differences in this area are relatively minor. There is a different script that does the initial X setup but config options for X and the nvidia driver haven't changed.


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 03, 2009 1:41 am 
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Location: Salem, MA
Awesome, thanks. Thanks in part to MythTV I've gotten real used to Debian. I'm still trying to get handle on the differences in Arch Linux and the last thing I want to do is something that will necessitate me re-installing R6 from scratch.

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PostPosted: Sat Oct 03, 2009 10:24 am 
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Location: Arlington, MA
I should probably clarify slightly, the config options for X and the nvidia driver are tied to the versions of those more than to R5.5/R6. If you're using one of the more current series of drivers in both places then the X configs are essentially the same too.

I've added the caveat for the unwary, since the driver version really matters. If you're running 173.14.09 under R5.5, and R6 picks 96.??.?? instead, your old X config may not play well with it.


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 03, 2009 11:42 pm 
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Location: Salem, MA
Okay, I've got the new card installed. I've got the new drivers installed:
Code:
NVIDIA dlloader X Driver  185.18.36


It seems like I'm still getting some blurring on motion that I wasn't noticing before (I'm probably real sensitive to it now because I've been trying to fix it).

Anyway, I've been looking and it appears that VDPAU might be the answer? Should I try upgrading to mythtv-vdpau, or should I just wait until the next version of MythTV comes out? BTW, this is on my frontend-only machine. If I upgraded to vdpau on this machine would the backend need to be upgraded too?

I still missing something? What Playback profile should I use for my hardware?

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