ATI and HD content
Submitted by quielb on August 21, 2007 - 10:55am
I got a hold of some 720p HD content over the weekend to see how it would preform on my ATI 9600 using the internal player.
CPU utilization was between 50%-70%. Video playback was very smooth.
There is an entry on the mythtv wiki that I can't find at the moment that has other user experiences with HD content.
Other hardware specs:
Celeron 2.2Ghz
1GB ram
160GB SATA HDD
Your mileage may vary, but HD is possible on an ATI 9600 with CPU to spare.
HD on Kword 110
I've added a Kworld 110 and am recording HD.
720p I can shadow ( watch while recording ) and still record another stream on my PVR 500 and run a commercial flag job.
1080i I can shadow but thats it. A comm flag job will cause jittery playback and pixelation.
Your mileage may vary, but at least for those of you with ATI cards now have a ballpark idea of what you need for HD.
It seems to me that the de-interlacing is what is causing the slowdown at 1080. I'm gonna set up my display to output an interlaced signal and let the TV handle de-interlacing and set Myth not to deinterlace and see if I can get some CPU back.
A multicore CPU would also help. The comm flag job would run on one core while mythfronend ( watching TV ) would run on another core.
Re: HD on Kword 110
A multicore CPU would also help. The comm flag job would run on one core while mythfronend ( watching TV ) would run on another core.
You ought to try that before you claim that it works that way.
A 3.0GHz P4 will get you there a lot cheaper.
Right you are Chris. There
Right you are Chris. There isn't a way to have a CPU chose to do a certain thing. It will though divide the load over the two.
"Please ignore the man behind the curtain"
Dennis
"Please ignore the man behind the curtain"
Dennis
Don't forget about the SMP
Don't forget about the SMP scheduler. It will move a process from one "cpu" to another as the process runs based on a number of things. The scheduler will look at the queue for a processor and submit the next instruction to the "cpu" with the shortest wait. In this case since mythfrontend runs at 80%+ on on cpu the scheduler has to do a context switch between comm flagging and mythfrontend on a single CPU. In the case of multiple CPUs ( or cores ) the scheduler will submit instructions based on an algorithm that takes into account context switching, wait queues, etc.
In the case of mythfrontend and comm flagging which are very linear operations, you should see a relatively linear increase in performance when running both jobs at the same time.
Re: ATI and HD content
I got a hold of some 720p HD content over the weekend to see how it would preform on my ATI 9600 using the internal player.
CPU utilization was between 50%-70%. Video playback was very smooth.
There is an entry on the mythtv wiki that I can't find at the moment that has other user experiences with HD content.
Other hardware specs:
Celeron 2.2Ghz
I'm finding 90-100% CPU utilization on a core 2 duo E6600 on 1080p/VC1 content. Of course, ffmpeg does not yet handle E-AC3 sound decoding (some things contain dts streams that are decodeable or at least passible to an S/PDIF). Also the EVO demuxer seems to have a problem with sound sync even when dts streams are present but at 90+% CPU utilization I'm not willing to bet on anything beyond resource starvation.
Re: ATI and HD content
I'm finding 90-100% CPU utilization on a core 2 duo E6600 on 1080p/VC1 content. Of course, ffmpeg does not yet handle E-AC3 sound decoding (some things contain dts streams that are decodeable or at least passible to an S/PDIF). Also the EVO demuxer seems to have a problem with sound sync even when dts streams are present but at 90+% CPU utilization I'm not willing to bet on anything beyond resource starvation.
Actually, it seems the cause of the audio sync problem and the suprising CPU utilization was mplayer trying to run the movies at ~ 30 fps (30000/1001 to be exact) when films are ~ 24 fps creatures. With this kind of command line (and Kurtnoise13's E-AC3 / a52b patch) things work very nicely with more like 60-75% cpu utilization:
mplayer -vc ffvc1 -demuxer lavf -fps 24000/1001 -ac ffeac3 -aid 2 feature_SCANNERDARKLYN6FF_HD_1.EVO
What are you actually using
What are you actually using Mplayer for other than Mythstream? I thought MythTV used Xine primarily? Besides that, for anything other than DVD movies, it depends on your location, here in the US, NTSC is 29fps.
It's the law
There's a law written down somewhere that "The workload will always grow to fill or exceed the available capacity". Bill Gates took that as a philosophy and made himself and Intel rich by following it. Linux users should understand that the law applies to HDTV formats as well... :-)
Found it
Found the mythtv wiki entry:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC
You will notice that all of the video cards on the list are Nvidia cards. Even without XvMC an ATI card can keep up. Although the CPU utilization is a bit higher, you could could possibly watch HD content and still have CPU to record another stream.
AMD annoucement of open drivers (for Radeon)
Look at this post:
http://airlied.livejournal.com/50187.html
Great news a lonnng! time coming :^)
Yes this is great news. I
Yes this is great news. I have been following this and I hope this makes it into the new xorg when we come out with version 5.0. I'm really interested in seeing how the older Radeon cards will work using this module without the need of the ATI legacy driver(fglrx) cause this was a real PIA to get implemented.
"Please ignore the man behind the curtain"
Dennis
"Please ignore the man behind the curtain"
Dennis
Re: Yes this is great news. I
Yes this is great news. I have been following this and I hope this makes it into the new xorg when we come out with version 5.0. I
I've been happy with nVidia's linux suport (at least until the 8 series ..) as the quality and responsiveness have been there; I've wanted open source from them but I could live (happily with what they provied).
Until now, ATI had no chance to be in my systems. Depending on how things go my Penryn front end (getting the be out of the friggin living room) may have an ATI card. Or just the intel x3100 but the chance that I buy an ATI chip has gone from 0 to very good real quick.