[Openchrome-users] Hauppauge Nova-T and Via CLE266 - corrupted video when XvMC enabled... (PAL/UK)

[Jules Gosnell]

Guys,

I've just been kindly pointed at your list re the above problem by 
Daniel Kristjansson.

Here is a picture of the problem:

http://www.gosnell.org.uk/tmp/00032.jpg

I am running mythtv with a pair of Nova-T's (1 philips, 1 connexant 
chipset) in the backend and a 1Ghz VIA Ezra with CLE266 as a frontend. 
Both backend and frontend are running a fairly vanilla FC4 with latest 
updates from standard repos and latest mythtv from atrpms. The frontend 
is running the latest xorg-x111, ImageMagick and xine-lib from 
washington.kelkoo.net/epia.

Most of the recordings that I have will not play back with XvMC enabled 
on the front end - they get garbled (see enclosed link), either 2/3 or 
the whole of the screen area is affected. A few recordings play faultlessy,

Some channels seem more likely to produce good recordings than others... 
(perhaps it is the broadcast or the card used to record it or both ?).

Up until now, I had just asssumed that this was a MythTV bug, but I have 
just been told by Daniel that it may be an incompatibility between mpg 
formats produced by my backend and expected by my frontend ?

I would very much like to get to the bottom of the problem, as my 
frontend system is passively cooled and doing everything in s/w means 
that it runs very hot.

Here is what daniel said:

"VIA XvMC does not support most MPEG-2 streams. It only decodes
a subset of valid MPEG-2 streams. The PVR-250 recorder can be
configured to only generate streams that VIA XvMC can support,
but the Nova-T can not.

There is a long standing effort by the OpenChrome developers to
extend the VIA driver to support standard XvMC acceleration. If
you can program, it would be a good idea to join their mailing
list and help them get it done.

The thing to try first is to install MythTV and OpenChrome from
the development versions to see if this is something that has
already been fixed."

So, is the information whith which Daniel has provided me current ? 
Should I put the Nova-Ts on eBay and buy a pair of PVR-250s ? Does 
openchrome yet support what I need ? Is it likely to in the near future 
? etc...

Any light that anyone can shed on this would be much appreciated.

Thanks for openchrome,


Jules

-- 
"Open Source is a self-assembling organism. You dangle a piece of
string into a super-saturated solution and a whole operating-system
crystallises out around it."

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