Hi *

I tried to investigate subject by searching forum, but found no clear answer how & when.
I'm participating in DVB-T tests with H.264 compression.
Do somebody have idea when Myth will support natively watching H.264 streams ?

thx in advance

Not at my box right now, but someone has listed it as a major change in 0.20:



http://digg.com/linux_unix/MythTV_version_0_20_released

It supports it now, using the open source 264 code as part of ffmpeg. I am using it for BBC -Hd on DVB-S. I will comment on that, as i dont know whetehr the dvb-t bitrates make the decoding easier or harder

You need a beast of a machine for the DVB-S h.264 decode.

I am running a core2duo 1.8GHz chip, on my new machine, but I have to overclock it to 2.7GHz to drop the CPU utilisation below 100%. Unfortunately the open source 264 codec is single threaded, and only uses one core

two possible CPU savers:

You can add a small patch to disable the deblocking (Skiploopfilter) on the open source codec. Still uses single core, but drops the cpu load by 10-20 %

You can add a slightly bigger patch and enable the use of closed source (and non -free ) coreavc, which has the lowest cpu requirement h.264 at the moment.

However what you will find is that the playback in mythtv of either of these methods is not smooth Even if your CPU can keep up, you will find that there is somthing odd going on (I dot understand it myself) which leads to the picture jerking as if it is showing the fields in the wrong order or somthing. This appears to be a mythtv thing, as the same codecs work fine in windows, or under mplayer.

_________________
Duron1600 PCChips M848A
1Gb DDR400, 160Gb+160Gb+320Gb PATA HDD,320Gb USB2 HDD
Technisat DVB-T, 2x Skystar2 DVB-S 13,19,28.2 East

red321,

Thx for replay. "Fortunately" in next quarters H.264 in DVB-T will be used for SD only here in Poland...

I hope when DVB-T will be officially launched (before 2009 in Poland) we will have +10GHz multicore CPUs with few watts power consumption and HD on H.264 will consume only few % of CPU power ;-p

Seriously - I count on graphic cards with HW support for H.264 in the same way as today's cards are supporting iDCT, de-interlace & motion compensation. What do You think ?

Apparently the nvidia 8500 is supposed to give good h.264 support at low cost. Worth a google. I think it was on anandtech

_________________
Duron1600 PCChips M848A
1Gb DDR400, 160Gb+160Gb+320Gb PATA HDD,320Gb USB2 HDD
Technisat DVB-T, 2x Skystar2 DVB-S 13,19,28.2 East

Yes:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2874
worth reading.
thx

Yes I read that one recently, it basically told me that if my processor wasn't fast enough for h.264 then it wasn't worth buying a better card.

I didn't mean that article I meant , THIS one

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2977

The older cards help, but the 8600 8500 cards will do ALL of the h.264 in the gpu.

Truly excellent, unfortunately I dont see any mention of Linux support, and as far as I know up till now pure video has been a windows only driver option

_________________
Duron1600 PCChips M848A
1Gb DDR400, 160Gb+160Gb+320Gb PATA HDD,320Gb USB2 HDD
Technisat DVB-T, 2x Skystar2 DVB-S 13,19,28.2 East

well, it was always misery for me why hw vendors are ignoring so huge and growing linux market in favor stagnant widows market...