On Jul 31, 2005, at 3:06 PM, Todd Ignasiak wrote:
I've been doingh the same analysis on HD playback .   I've been doing
XvMC with an FX5200 AGP card.  When it's working well, it's very good.
 But, I get the "prebuffering pause" issues, which causes choppy
playback

I don't have a tuner in my MythTV box right now. For my setup with the SD DirecTIVO it doesn't make sense for me to invest in a MythTV box for SD. My Pundit strictly handles DVD playback using MythTV as a nice front end to Xine.

I'm surprised that you were able to do HD playback via the PCI bus.  I
didn't think the bandwidth was sufficient for [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  Maybe XvMC changes the equation a bit..  Can you still get decent HD
playback without XvMC

I have a few test clips I used. One of which was the test clip found on the pchdtv.com site. Others are available from various locations on the Internet. On the Pundit with a 2.4GHz Northwood P4 chip I cannot playback any HDTV streams without serious stuttering. All to be expected. Once I popped in the PCI FX 5200 I was able to play back the same test clips with the previously noted issues. CPU was around 35% during playback.

Another thing I'm interested in is the 'Unichrome' display adapters.
This S3/VIA video chips do full MPEG decoding, not just the iDCT+MC
done with XvMC.  I don't know if it is any more/less capable with
things like de-interlacing.   Also, the 'Unichrome' version is
integrated into the motherboard, I don't know if they have the same
capabilities in their add-in cards.

I've thought about this too. Right now the investment is to high for me to pick one up on the cheap to try out. As such, I think the way to go would be a nice powerful CPU and a quality DVI based video card. Together with existing Linux post processing software in Xine (which uses stuff based on tvtime) I think the quality would be as good as it gets for a HTPC.

Prior to moving to MythTV, I
used a 'MyHD' card in Windows.  It had a hardware MPEG decoder, which
did a nice job of scaling and de-interlacing, which almost no CPU
requirements.   I would love to find something similar for MythTV.

I think lots of us would. Right now such a solution doesn't exist. i would expect as HDTV becomes more popular here in the US we'll see something for Linux in the next 5 years. Right now hardware HDTV decoding and playback on Linux seems to be where V4L was 5-6 years ago.
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