On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 17:45:25 +0100, Sven Neumann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I am using a fanless EPIA VIA system in our living room. See > http://svenfoo.geekheim.de/index.php/2006-11-20/music-everywhere/ for > some more details. I am currently using mpd for audio playback and vlc > for video and DVD playback. This setup works nicely but I would prefer a > real media center solution. > > Today I gave elisa a try. The debian packages installed nicely. I had to > update libgl1-mesa-dri to the version from debian experimental to fix a > bug in the VIA Unichrome DRI driver but finally got elisa up and > running. >
Ok that's nice to hear :) > First of all, let me state that I am very impressed with the software. > It's easy to install and worked almost out of the box. I also like the > fact that it is not centred around watching TV. A lot of other projects > suffer from this. TV is unimportant for me. > > Now to the actual subject of my mail. While I got elisa up and running > on my hardware, the performance leaves a lot to desire. The UI works > reasonably well (not smooth, but OK). Audio playback works, but takes > about 70% CPU. My current solution (mpd) does playback of MP3 files with > about 15% CPU usage. Performance of the picture viewer is acceptable. > > Video playback however is absolutely not usable. While vlc and mplayer > both manage to play back pretty much any video on this hardware with > about 40% CPU usage, elisa video playback eats up all the CPU cycles and > still doesn't manage to bring more than one or two frames per second to > the screen. > EPIA based computers are currently not very well supported by Pigment, the Elisa rendering/widget engine. The problem is that GPUs used by EPIA boxes (most of the time) don't implement OpenGL features (like GLSL shaders) used by Pigment. Those features are currently critical to get smooth video playback on Elisa. Mplayer and VLC work fine for you on the same hardware because they use the XV extension. At some point Pigment might make use of that as well, there's a opened ticket in our Trac, see https://core.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/ticket/63 > I understand that the project is at an early stage. All I want to know > is if there's a chance that it will ever work reasonably well on such > low-end hardware. Is there anything I could try to improve performance > of video playback? > Right now I'm afraid there's nothing you can do to improve video performance of video playback. We haven't planned yet XV support in Pigment, you're not the first to need it and you won't probably be the last :) Philippe
