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PostPosted: Thu Dec 27, 2012 1:32 pm 
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I'm not at the computer right now, so I will not have all of the specifics, but it is a combined FE/BE with no other frontends on the network. The HDHomeruns are on a gigabit switch with the DVR. The hard drive is I think a 7200 RPM SATA internal and the /myth partition is XFS with 512MB blocks to reduce fragmentation. There is only one hard drive. It is connected to a 1080p TV (for the last 4 years) from the DVI out to an HDMI converter. I have traditionally just had the resolution at 1280x720 to put a minimal tax on the CPU and onboard video (nvidia 6150).

I'm considering taking the VDPAU capable video card out of my desktop and seeing if it has any better results. I had tried it with one of the early Knoppmyth releases with VDPAU support, but there were so many artifacts that the playback was unwatchable.


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PostPosted: Fri Dec 28, 2012 3:19 pm 
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marc.aronson wrote:
I have two systems:

-- Single core ATOM + ION connected to a 1080p TV.
-- Dual core ATOM + ION connected to a 720p TV.

I am driving full resolution on both units, but I am using ION's hardware assisted video decoding. The deinterlacing is also hardware based.

We're all thinking CPU, but there is another angle. Are you disk drives local or network attached? In general, tell us more about your storage setup.


BTW Marc, now that I have gotten rid of my Hauppauge PVR-500 I no longer need a PCI port and I was thinking of trying to replace some hardware since I have random lockups that must be hardware related (probably the motherboard). Since AM2 motherboards are basically extinct, I was considering replacing the whole thing with an ATOM + ION unit. Are they capable of being a standalone BE/FE? I see a lot of people using them as Frontends so I wasn't sure if they would have a problem handling the additional I/O.

Something like this, maybe? http://www.amazon.com/ZOTAC-ZBOX-Intel- ... s=atom+ion


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PostPosted: Fri Dec 28, 2012 5:06 pm 
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Location: California
knappster wrote:
I was considering replacing the whole thing with an ATOM + ION unit. Are they capable of being a standalone BE/FE? I see a lot of people using them as Frontends so I wasn't sure if they would have a problem handling the additional I/O.


Both of my units are FE/BE units. A bit more detail:

The dual-core atom 330 + ION does: Front end, back end, HandBrake encoding to MP4, crashplan server, Calibre server.

The single core atom + ION does: Front end, back end, crash plan server.

EDIT: Before you buy that Amazon system, check out this one on Newegg - include Blu-ray for $249 after rebate.

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PostPosted: Fri Dec 28, 2012 5:10 pm 
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Here's another one on newegg that is an even better deal -- $179 after rebate.

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PostPosted: Sat Dec 29, 2012 12:32 am 
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AM2 not supported bah. My system is a 939 chip set. The failed offspring of the 754. An AM2 system would be an upgrade to me.

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PostPosted: Sun Dec 30, 2012 3:08 pm 
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I don't know if this helps, but the difference between OTA and cable shows is that OTA is encoded as MPEG-2 while cable, satellite, and others generally use MPEG-4 encoding for better compression. The playback of MPEG-2 vs. MPEG-4 is very different. I think your Atom may not be capable of decoding MPEG-4 in real time without some help. The VDPAU is a good idea -- in fact I thought the ION chip could do VDPAU.

Here is a quote from the nVidia board about ION and VDPAU that might be relevant:

Quote:
My new Zotac HD-ID11 "Ion2" system was also stuttering with some 1080i content in MythTV (Advanced/2x) when I first set it up. The problem was cured by telling MythTV to use two (2) threads for decoding/playback rather than the default of one (1) thread.

Perhaps something similar might work here?
Your original Ion system probably isn't quite as quick for VDPAU as the next-gen Ion2 is, so you may have to drop back a notch on the quality settings. Depending upon what qvdpautest says for it.

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PostPosted: Sun Dec 30, 2012 4:58 pm 
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I spent last night exhausting everything I could to try to figure this out via software/drivers. HD Ringbuffer Size, Xorg settings, Sync to Vblank options, nvidia drivers, resolutions, frequencies (I think I am stuck with 60 Hz refresh rate). Then this morning I added a spare HD to use for a Live TV storage group to ensure it wasn't an I/O with my single hard drive. It did not improve.

I finally moved my Sparkle 9500 GT 1 GB card from my desktop computer to the DVR. I set the playback settings to VDPAU High Quality and everything looks beautiful. I still can't figure out why the problem was only with actively recording videos at 24fps, but I'm not sure I will ever find out. The video card is passively cooled, so despite the fact that the CPU usage is much lower now, the overall temperature is higher (GPU has been as high as 69C while playing 1080i at 1280x720 resolution).

I've probably spent an hour googling information on VDPAU cards and have been unable to figure out definitely what will work at 1080i with Advanced (2x) deinterlacing. While this card seems to be working fine, it is 2 years old and running pretty warm, so I may be looking for an upgrade/sidegrade in the near future.

It looks like the atom + ion is on hold unless I decide to add a frontend sometime soon.


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