My mythbox (described in my sig) is a little too old to be playing 1080 content it can bearly handle playing back 720. Is there a way to tell mythtv not to record 1080 content? Thanks.

MattBatt

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My System

Seems you would lose a lot of content not recording 1080. maybe setup a transcode script after recording 1080? the xvid script works well for some. You can even set it up to transcode automatically after a recording.

I have a SD tv. I've tried trans-coding it takes days. I just went through and deleted the HD channels and left the SD digital QAM channels. but I'm looking for a better solution.

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You could get a Nvidia 8400 card or better for your box if you have space for it. With the right GPU to off-load the video decoding even a meager Atom can play 1080 video.

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The Atomic Ant.

mattbatt

This is the system that I ran for five years.

AMD 64 3200 socket 754
Asus K8NE-deluxe
1 GB Ram DDR400
Nvidia GeForce 5200 128MB DDR
3 pcHD3000 pci cards
120 GB Hard Drive PATA
MCE remote

I never used XVMC (Video Acceleration) I let the CPU crunch the video. Average processor load for recording 3 HD channels and watching a 1080i was 80%.

So not to waste that 20% of processor time I would have commercial detection start when the recording started. Between commercial detection and transcodeing my processor would run at 100% from 7:00pm to 11:00pm. The key to making this work was to set the backend CPU usage to "High"

I commercial cut and transcoded everything. If I remember right I ran about 120 frames per second commercial detecting (no video playback) and about 30 fps with video playback. If only one show was recording (which was rare) the commercial detection would be done by the end of the recording.

Why transcode to a smaller size or format? I only transcoded high quality lossless, that knocks down the file size to 75% about 7gig for a 1 hour 1080i show or about 10 minutes of 100% dedicated cpu time.

Go into webmin ">others>command shell" and run "top -b -n 1" and see if you are swapping to disk. Follow "graysky" advice here http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=20676
I would even recommend this even if you have 1 gig or less.

A AMD 3200 single core make a very good frontend / master backend machine. If it isn't working you have a software / hardware problem.

Question:
What kind of video do you have? memory? can it do 1080? not all can
Are you running XVMC?
What resolution are you outputting to your TV?
What is the native resolution for your TV?

TVBox

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TVBox
LinHES R8.6.1

mattbatt - I'm playing back 1080i just fine with very similar hardware.

http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5246
http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=19668

It stutters occasionally without XvMC (which I have to disable for CBS) but generally just plain works.

thanks guys!
my hardware is almost identical to yours tv box my asus k8nse deluxe died a few years ago and i replaced it with some foxconn board that was cheap. The video card I believe is the 5200 i need to check its AGP slot so those cards are hard to find new chips in.

i am running the front end at 1024x768 my tv is SD so it's resolution is 640x480. hulu and the web dont read well at NTSC.

I'm going to try some of those links and see if that helps. right now i cant watch anything if i'm recording HD and SD.

thanks again.

typed on my android phone.

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changing the swap settings worked like a charm. As an added bonus closed captioning now works! i dont know why but there they were in the 1080 recording. now to tackle that transcoding issue.

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actually I need to play with the settings some more The HD videos were playing back but whenever anything is recording all playback is jumpy so I need to play with the swap settings some more.

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If you haven't already, done so change your playback profile to one that uses XvMC. Since you have a FX5200 you can even use the chromakey option and still have a color OSD. This typically drops the CPU use dramatically. Beware that certain broadcasters (CBS is the big one) do stuff to their MPEG streams that can make XvMC hang, and for those you'll have to fall back to one of the software decoders.

mattbatt

What is your video aperture setting in the bios? 128M would be the norm. with your amount of ram you could go to 256M but the likely hood that it would be a benefit is slim.

While you are in the bios have you turned off all the things you don't need like Serial, parallel, game port. It frees up IRC

Is commercial detection running when you are having problems?
Information Center>>system Status>>Job Queue
Arrow down into it.

I differ from tjc here I would turn off XvMC
setup>>TV Settings>>Playback>>Playback Profiles
and set it to CPU++

Buy default LinHES 6.?? picks your profiles according to the BogoMIPS of your system. Your 3200 should have picked CPU+ Which only uses XvMC to playback 1080 MP2 files. Every thing smaller than 1080i is played by CPU decoder. Anything sound familiar.

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Playback_profiles

After you get your problems worked out and then turn it back on.
XvMC has it's share of quirks, playing back a transcoded file seems to be another one of them.

Do you have any uncompleted (locked up) jobs in your Job Queue?
Information Center>>system Status>>Job Queue
If you find any delete them.

TVBox

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TVBox
LinHES R8.6.1

Well the agp apperature size was set to 64 I bumped it up to 256 512 is the highest setting. I turned off the parallel and printer ports (why didn't I think of that)!
I have set it to cpu++. Setting the background tasks to high cpu usage has caused some stuttering during video playback however transcoding the 1080 files on high quality seems to have improved playback on the big files all by it'self.

Just tested recording jimmy kimmel HD and scrubs SD. Playing back SD content looks smooth and beautiful (making progress). Playing HD, the video was playing in perfect slow motion and the audio was jumping along playing little bits at a time to stay in time to the video.

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My System

If your system isn't keeping up at HD resolutions off loading the CPU will almost certainly help. Since that's the whole point of XvMC ...

The difference can be pretty dramatic too, 720P without XvMC (starting to get close to the edge):

720p with XvMC (not an issue to be seen):

1080i without XvMC (glitchy and stuttering):

1080i with XvMC (Smooth as butter):

just for historial search reasons
vdpau wouldnt work on my system because the card is agp
i ran accross this today
www.mythtv.org/wiki/VDPAU#Caveats

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