I just re-built my MythTV box using a 2.4GHz P4 and a PVR-350. I'm currently running ivtv version 0.2.0 (rc3j) and the ivtvdev XFree86 driver.

Normal recording/viewing works great. I've recently started using MythVideo and current have it configured to play video files using mplayer -framedrop -vo x11. The picture quality is great, audio/video sync is good, but it's dropping a lot of frames. Motion is jerky and panning is blocky -- I'd guess it's not doing much better than 5-10 fps on the video side of things. I tried xine, and did the same -- and then immediately complained about the number of frames being dropped because my system was too slow.

What are people doing to get decent performance out of mplayer or xine?

xv? Bleeding edge ivtv seems to have xv support, but from what I've seen on the ivtv list, it's still pretty experimental and not ready for day to day use.

Switching from ivtv to the vanilla framebuffer support is going to be even slower, right?

Did the work on sending a YUV stream to the '350 using an mplayer plugin ever get anywhere? Google can't seem to anything recent on that subject.

I've also seen references to an mplayer plugin that re-encodes the video as mpeg2 and sends it to the 350, but I'm having troubling finding info on that also. Is that what "mpegpes" refers to? Any documentation on how to set that up?

What do people recommend for getting smoother video performance from MythVideo?

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Grant

looks like you've done your homework and covered all the options. I know it's not the answer you want, but right now the answer is there is no really good option.

The only other thing you didn't specifically mention was the badz driver some people claim success with that and x11. Last I saw it was still hosted on geocities and was often over the bandwith limit. (I've never tried this one myself. so YMMV)

http://membres.lycos.fr/badzzzz/

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Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

I just grabbed the Badzzz iptv binary for the PVR-350 and it made an incredible difference in framerate. I stopped the -framedrop option and it looks great and sound stays synced even in action/pan/zoom scenes.

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2.6ghz Intel, PVR-350,512MB ram

Which one is "the ivtv binary?" The kernel-module ivtv driver, or the ivtvdev XFree86 driver? I'm guessing the latter, since I don't see a binary link for the ivtv driver. Any info how the "badzzz" ivtvdev driver differs from the ivtvdev driver that came with ivtv 0.2.0 in 5A16? It appears that I'm currently running 0.4, and the version on the badzzz site is 0.1 (dated Feb 2004).

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Grant

I installed the ivtvdev_drv.o driver from that page. Video playback using mplayer and -vo x11 looks exactly the same as it did with the ivtvdev_drv.o driver that was was installed as part of KnoppMyth: jerky motion and "stairstepping" or tearing.

Have other people really seen a marked difference between the two versions of ivtvdev_drv.o?

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Grant

I built and installed ivtv 0.3.7h, and the xv support seems to be working nicely. There are a few glitches so far:

1. The xv support apparently doesn't know how to initialize the decoder chip, so you have to watch TV or another recording before the xv stuff works.
2. The mplayer full screen option (-fs) causes the xv code to lock up. Getting rid of the '-fs -zoom' and replacing it with '-vf scale=720:480' seems to work well for 4:3 video files.
3. Watching files with other aspect ratios requires adjusing the scaling parameters, and you end up with the MythTV "desktop" showing above and below a 16:9 video window. I think there's a work-around for that involving changing an alpha setting to make the desktop go away while mplayer is running.

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Grant