Video

Apparently the key to HD playback on MythTV using the Intel integrated X3100 video card (G33 chipset) is not the "extra audio buffering" setting. In a previous post, I enabled this setting and suddenly my HD video stopped stuttering.

Unfortunately, that wasn't totally the solution. When I started playing back my homemade DVDs (from iDVD), I noticed they were all playing back audio fine, but the video was choppy, like the frames were dropping. The audio tracks on these DVDs were uncompressed PCM. Anything else (like AC3) would be fine. The issue was that I was using OSS for sound (via /dev/dsp).

The trick here is to use ALSA. Changing the sound output in MythTV to ALSA and undoing the "extra audio buffering" yielded HD playback and smooth DVDs with PCM audio.

So far, I can get the Intel X3100 to perform well with MPEG-2 HD (720p and 1080i) content, DVDs (with greedyhdeint x2) and MPEG-4/AAC video at HD frame sizes but low bitrates. Unfortunately, h.264 video from the HD PVR 1212 with 720p frame sizes at high bitrates (the 7, 10 and 13.5 samples found here) still peg my Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz at 102%+

MythTV 0.21 was recently released. I've been compiling and running from the 0.21-fixes CVS branch, but still have audio issues in MythVideo with some videos that have AC3 audio. It's been found that the NuppelVideoPlayer expects the audio not to be more than 2 seconds out of sync with the video.

It hasn't made it's way into the -fixes branch as a patch, but someone on the mythtv-dev list was kind enough to help me out with this patch, so I'm keeping it here for my own records. Maybe it'll help out some other MythTV users:

mythtv_increaseAudioTolerance.patch

There is an open ticket in the MythTV Trac system #4764, but the posted patch doesn't exactly patch well against the current -fixes release, nor does it compile after manual changes.

I actually finished it on December 22, the same night as my last post, but never got around to posting the screenshots. I don't feel like battling through the ghost ship boss again, so here's a shot of the ghost ship on the map and my mighty-fine looking boat! I guess they don't have completed game save screens like in FF...