Only for Via based systems. For nVidia, you'll have to modify or create a new playback profile.

The "test" on the link you mention seems to confirm that XvMC is, indeed, active.

Welp, I tried the extra ram. But y'all seem confident it is actually the card? Thank you! I'll make the purchase then...

(Question. When I tried to update the nvidia driver as per
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... diaDrivers
X window stopped displaying altogether and I had no idea how to get it back. When X started, would just flash then be gone. So, if I buy this new card, is there any reasonably automated way to upgrade to it, or, after putting it in, am I consigned to autoinstall knoppmyth again from scratch for a reasonable shot at success?) :\

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Knoppmyth R6 Preview auto - Dell Dimension 2400 2.4 GHz - 1.2gb ram - Sparkle GeForce 8400GS (was MX4000 128MB) PCI TV-out - HDHomeRun dual ATSC over gigabit. It's not Greek to me, just Linux

Thanks, bigbro! Seems DMA is on

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Knoppmyth R6 Preview auto - Dell Dimension 2400 2.4 GHz - 1.2gb ram - Sparkle GeForce 8400GS (was MX4000 128MB) PCI TV-out - HDHomeRun dual ATSC over gigabit. It's not Greek to me, just Linux

Funny, it seems that TV-out actually performs a bit better than VGA out to CRT (800x600).

It is MX series card, older than FX series it seems.

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Knoppmyth R6 Preview auto - Dell Dimension 2400 2.4 GHz - 1.2gb ram - Sparkle GeForce 8400GS (was MX4000 128MB) PCI TV-out - HDHomeRun dual ATSC over gigabit. It's not Greek to me, just Linux

"playback profile" is the xorg.conf file?

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Knoppmyth R6 Preview auto - Dell Dimension 2400 2.4 GHz - 1.2gb ram - Sparkle GeForce 8400GS (was MX4000 128MB) PCI TV-out - HDHomeRun dual ATSC over gigabit. It's not Greek to me, just Linux

Okay, found it and 'bout to buy it! DMA is enabled, XvMC is enabled, it's the card right? Right now CPU is maxed during play (of any video codec) -- this video card should fix that, right -- free up the CPU?

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Knoppmyth R6 Preview auto - Dell Dimension 2400 2.4 GHz - 1.2gb ram - Sparkle GeForce 8400GS (was MX4000 128MB) PCI TV-out - HDHomeRun dual ATSC over gigabit. It's not Greek to me, just Linux

Make sure it is an AGP card. The PCI bus with the PCI version of the FX5200 does not have the through-put to handle HD. For that matter make sure your motherboard does more than 1X AGP. I'm not sure what the minimum "X" is, but I think 4X works fine.

The fact that your MX4000 is PCI would keep it from doing HD properly even if it did have enough horsepower.

See this thread:
http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.p ... agp+fx5200

Doh! Well... there is onboard video out only on the Dimension 2400, no AGP slot.

Means no PCI card would do it?

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Knoppmyth R6 Preview auto - Dell Dimension 2400 2.4 GHz - 1.2gb ram - Sparkle GeForce 8400GS (was MX4000 128MB) PCI TV-out - HDHomeRun dual ATSC over gigabit. It's not Greek to me, just Linux

P.S. XvMC only kicks in with MPEG-2, is that right? Seems OSD is color whenever I play transcoded (.nuv) material. Funny -- HD OTA raw is almost smooth when OSD not up, but 480x480 DIVX is stuttering. Didn't used to stutter... wonder what I did! Oh well.

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Knoppmyth R6 Preview auto - Dell Dimension 2400 2.4 GHz - 1.2gb ram - Sparkle GeForce 8400GS (was MX4000 128MB) PCI TV-out - HDHomeRun dual ATSC over gigabit. It's not Greek to me, just Linux

You may get some improvement with your current card on over the air HD by changing your OSD renderer to "chroma key" in your "playback profiles" in R5.5. This will also result in color OSD with XVMC enabled. Also you should uncheck "OSD Fade" while you're there.

In Pre R5.5 you had to edit the database to turn "chroma key" on. You also needed to set "XvmcUsesTextures" to false manually. You may still need to do that last part manually in xorg.conf. Check your xorg.conf for the following and play with the settings. Also try uncommenting the NVAGP option.



This is not supported for Nvidia cards newer than the FX5200. It helps with the 5200. It may help with the MX4000, but not sure about that. Its worth a try.

Interesting results. Trancoded (480x480 DIVX bitrate 900) stutters a bit, 92+ CPU load. OSD no additional problem, though. Meanwhile, HD OTA, not transcoded when OSD gone, plays with very little stuttering. In other words, 1080 OTA is playing better than tiny transcoded DIVX. (Transcoded to HQ 1080 DIVX -- forget it, system comes to complete halt).

Side question if anybody can steer me straight. In RECORDING PROFILES, I have two items. One is for my tuner, called "HDHomeRun Recorders", the other is called "Transcoders".

In "HDHomeRun Recorders", "Low Quality" seems to use the "Lowest Quality" settings in "Transcoders". However, I see no pointers from one to the other (From "HDHomeRun Recorders" items to "Transcoder" items), the relationship just seems to magically exist.

"Transcoders" items are what's listed in scheduling options. But when a recording already exists on disk, the only way to transcode it is through the OSD menu, which instead lists the recorders items and not the transcoder items. So of I create a new transcoder, let's call it "Even lower (320x240)", how do I access it via the OSD transcoding menu? (And how is it that the "Low Quality" recorder knows to use the existing "Lowest Quality" transcoder? How do I point it around to a transcoder of choice? I guess I don't really understand the relationships here.)



Thanks... results coming back shortly....

Okay, well, only changing the decoder in profiles seemed to force color OSD on mpeg2, otherwise always insisted on B&W OSD for raw HD (mpeg2). And not as good all around, high CPU load, slow refresh. Went back to stock "CPU--" profile. Funny that non-XvMC stutters, even teeny-weeny dimensions.

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Knoppmyth R6 Preview auto - Dell Dimension 2400 2.4 GHz - 1.2gb ram - Sparkle GeForce 8400GS (was MX4000 128MB) PCI TV-out - HDHomeRun dual ATSC over gigabit. It's not Greek to me, just Linux

Sorry, maybe I've misunderstood your situation.

My Athlon 2400+ system, even with XvMC on, does stutter when the OSD is on, even with all the fade and transparency effects turned off. It plays back fine when the OSD goes away. My solution to that problem is to avoid bringing up the OSD.

If playback of HD material is fine with XvMC on, then you're doing fine. I don't think that a new video card will help with OSD stuttering on HD material: you would need a more powerful system for that.

Transcoding everything is not a practical solution, since transcoding is also very CPU-intensive.

Your CPU is indeed "CPU--". Picking some other profile will certainly lead to stuttering, even "teeny-weeny dimensions."

That's edifying to know. Interesting. No, I don't think you've misunderstood, instead I think I've done my best to be confusing My situation has evolved since posting my first message. "CPU--" helped. Somewhere early on I added the lone Option "UseEvents" "true" line (but not the other lines yet) as per the UpdateNVidiaDrivers wiki, which further reduced stutter for mpeg2 streams. Probably the R55 patcher helped a bit too, I dunno. I didn't know anything about XvMC then (see, since posting this, I've learned from the likes of you things like, raw OTA HD is an mpeg2 stream, and XvMC accelerates mpeg2! Do I get a cookie?)

So what's happened, in short, HD stuttering has improved. It's still there, but improved to the point where HD is probably quite watchable now. Of concern though, a couple of times with OSD on (I haven't mentioned this) Myth froze on a video frame or black screen, and the only way out was to ssh in and kill mythfrontend. Hasn't happened last couple of days of playing with it. Crossing my fingers. Others in the house will crumple up the Myth box and stuff it under my pillow if it turns out to be a lemon requiring me to ssh in and restore things. They will demand that we just buy a real DVR. I shudder.

Fortunately I held off long enough on buying the FX5200 -- y'all convinced me that PCI bottleneck might be the problem. And the links you provided showed people struggling with other mysteries of FX5200 installation, very scary to me. Seems to me I'm getting the same results with PCI MX4000 as users in those threads are getting with PCI FX5200. (Except, maybe, for displaying DIVX transcodes??)



You're right, XvMC, fade off, shortest possible OSD times, is treatment (not exactly cure) enough that HD viewing is better. As far as transcoding, however, I've also calculated (tell me if I'm right) that 1080 HD will eat about 8 GB / hour of my 120 GB disk? SOOO I've forged ahead with automatic transcoding. Transcoding does not seem to interfere with anything as MythTranscode process (or whatever it's called) seems to be very "nice" when other important tasks are running. I'll confirm when I actually start recording whole shows. But I think having the machine transcoding all the time may not be a problem. I'll let you know. I think I'll let shows live as HD for a couple of days, then if my wife and/or I miss premium time window, automatic transcode will start (I've finally figured out how to set all that up -- Myth is not a straightforward interface!) Here's what I've discovered:



Transcoded video (into DIVX mpeg4) skips video frames on display unless it is teeny-weeny dimensions, less than about 370x370. Over that size, CPU is at 90 percent plus. Tell me if I perceive this correctly: this is because the mpeg4 is not accelerated on display like mpeg2 is? And DIVX is cpu intensive? (I'm surprised a 2.4GHz can't handle DIVX display any larger.) On our old SD CRT TV, 370x370 (or even a bit smaller) actually doesn't look any worse than our ancient Series One lifetime TIVO at basic quality (sadly obsolete when analog OTA stops next month here in U.S. of A!)

So that's where I am, my friend, and you have been a tremendous guide for me. I'll know how tenable my setup is once I install it in the living room and start recording and watching shows for real, heavy duty. And not find it crumpled under my pillow.

For anybody who is still awake and game.... okay, I'll even shrink the font size now so as to appear humble and unobtrusive:

A couple head-scratchers remain for me. One is, I swear 480x480 DIVX was playable at one time, but now I need to go even smaller -- I don't know what I did to reduce that capability. Not much to do but shrug I guess. Second is - what on earth is the role of "Recorders", how is it that the "Low Quality" recorder knows to run the "Lowest Quality" transcoder, and how does one change that? In recorders I can find no place where transcoders are specified. The linkage just seems to be preset magic.

Re: Knoppmyth install -- is there any way to have my box sleep and wake up when needed, so it isn't whirring all the time in our living room? I've activated screensaver in Flukebox, and also told it to go to sleep, then suspend. But only the screensaver ever activates.

(Oh! Is there CLI ways I can query PCI bus speed, disk speed, etc? Okay I'm done now.)

(Oh! And how on earth do I actually update Nvidia drivers without having X display die? I won't do it now, but I'd love to understand this. Any wiki's -- besides "UpdateNvidiaDrivers" that tell how to configure these things? The updater said settings were backed up... but that doesn't do me much good, since I had no idea where or what to do. My only answer was a fresh autoinstall, not a place I want to return to.)

Okay I'm really done now.

What future historians can take away from this thread is, PCI MX4000 seems to play HD about as well as FX5200. Maybe. I think.

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Knoppmyth R6 Preview auto - Dell Dimension 2400 2.4 GHz - 1.2gb ram - Sparkle GeForce 8400GS (was MX4000 128MB) PCI TV-out - HDHomeRun dual ATSC over gigabit. It's not Greek to me, just Linux

You are correct that XvMC is currently only accelerating MPEG2 playback. I think there is potential for accelerating MPEG4 playback but I'm pretty sure it's still not doing so right now.

Yep, HD recordings take up quite a bit of space, so your 160GB drive will fill up quickly.

I'm sure you're already coming to this conclusion, but in order to really utilize that HDHomeRun, you're probably looking at a brand new system: faster CPU (and nowadays probably a dual processor), faster video card (AGP based), bigger hard drive. Of course, it'd also be good to play back HD recordings onto a HDTV, so that would mean a TV upgrade too.

I like to do these things a little at a time if budget is tight. Get the video card one month, get the motherboard the next month, get the CPU the third month, get the HD when one goes on sale. HDTV is harder to do that with.

Some of your other questions are probably best asked in a separate thread. I'll say briefly that...

(a) I don't use MythTV transcoding much so I've not messed with those options. I usually just copy recordings (after editing) to another box and use another utility to transcode them (VisualHub, latest Handbrake, avidemux if I'm desperate). But I have enough disk space to leave recordings in their original format until I'm ready to transcode them for archiving or viewing on some other device (iPod, PSP, etc.)

(b) Upgrading Nvidia drivers... I am pretty sure you have to do it at the command line and X has to be off. In fact, I'm almost positive that the Nvidia updater will refuse to run if X is running. However, I also think that you can SSH in and do it remotely.

Good luck!

Whoa, whoa, not so fast! I'm a bit more modest than that I just want to continue to watch my TV after analogue OTA expires next month. Replaces my S1 lifetime TIVO that was a housewarming gift a million years ago. Seems people have slower systems than mine working with HD and PCI hardware. This computer is not ancient, it's just not "this year".



Yup, CLI, x off, that's exactly what I did, as per "UpdateNvidiaDrivers" wiki. X display no longer worked right, I got stranded. Anyway, you're right, it's for another post.



Thank you for everything!!! Definite improvements.

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Knoppmyth R6 Preview auto - Dell Dimension 2400 2.4 GHz - 1.2gb ram - Sparkle GeForce 8400GS (was MX4000 128MB) PCI TV-out - HDHomeRun dual ATSC over gigabit. It's not Greek to me, just Linux