Mythtv box

[deanjo]

Your keyboard has a nipple

BT or RF is pretty similar in performance since... its more or less the same thing. Not too crazy about IR -- I guess OK for a remote, my old keyboard was IR -- really sucked since if it was sitting on the table, the edge of the table would block the signal

I looked at the harmony remotes, but got scared away by the prices...

Finding a good RF KB with range is hard to find. I find most of the RF based units are susceptible to interference. With BT devices I haven't had any issue, 25-30 feet is not a problem where as the RF based ones I've found are only good up to about 6 feet in my home.

The harmony remote that I have wasn't bad, it cost only $10 more then my old ATI remote wonder did and the range and functionality easily trumps the Remote wonder. Being able to control the rest of the devices are a big plus and not having to worry about setting up a separate IR Blaster is also a bonus.

Bit off topic but my old satellite receiver used to use an RF based remote. Unfortunately every once and a while one of my neighbors would end up changing my channel on it with his remote for his receiver. Got to find out that my neighbor likes the PPV pr0n.

[droidhacker]

Finding a good RF KB with range is hard to find. I find most of the RF based units are susceptible to interference. With BT devices I haven't had any issue, 25-30 feet is not a problem where as the RF based ones I've found are only good up to about 6 feet in my home.

The specs on this unit are up to 33 feet. I tested and confirm that
It is also capable of automatic frequency negotiation in case of interference. I can't really test that though since I don't think that there's much in the way of 2.4 GHz signals around me.

Bit off topic but my old satellite receiver used to use an RF based remote. Unfortunately every once and a while one of my neighbors would end up changing my channel on it with his remote for his receiver. Got to find out that my neighbor likes the PPV pr0n.

He must have had a hAxx0r'd access card to be going to those channels... hope he didn't buy any on yours on days the RF was strong. That would be a fun explanation to the satellite company...
You: "my neighbor's RF remote took over my receiver and bought pr0n."
Them: "you don't have a neighbor within 2 km subscribing to our service."
You: "well they must be hAxx0r'ing it."
Them: "but our service is un-hAxx0r-able."

[droidhacker]

Just found out that there is still one piece missing from 970015 out-of-box support on F14... the kernel module

Red Hat's ambassador to broadcom, Mr. Jarod Wilson, explained to me that there's still a bunch of work to do cleaning it up enough to push upstream, but that the module can be built from his GIT. The rest of the required components (libcrystalhd, crystalhd-firmware, and gstreamer-plugin-crystalhd) are all in place for the 970015. The 970012 should work with the upstream kernel module, but it isn't as advanced in terms of the media it can process.

[deanjo]

I don't think that there's much in the way of 2.4 GHz signals around me.

There are a ton of them around here.

He must have had a hAxx0r'd access card to be going to those channels... hope he didn't buy any on yours on days the RF was strong. That would be a fun explanation to the satellite company...
You: "my neighbor's RF remote took over my receiver and bought pr0n."
Them: "you don't have a neighbor within 2 km subscribing to our service."
You: "well they must be hAxx0r'ing it."
Them: "but our service is un-hAxx0r-able."

Na it wasn't a haxored box but it was funny watching my box reject the PPV pin code.

[droidhacker]

Update on the state of things....
So I built and installed the crystalhd module from Jarod's GIT. That went nice and it immediately was happy to activate the card. So... good, right?

Not quite.
The two common approaches to using it involve gstreamer/totem and xbmc. Nothing I did managed to convince gstreamer/totem to use the crystalhd plugin... I might be missing something and will look more into it, but wouldn't you figure that the crystalhd plugin should provide the h264 decoder? Maybe not... maybe some other plugin provides the h264 decoder and uses the crystalhd plugin for the hard work... or maybe it's broken. Not sure. I don't particularly care for totem anyway, so not a big loss.

xbmc was easy to convince to use the crystalhd -- as long as the module is loaded and associated with the hardware, and libcrystalhd is installed and accessible, it'll do it.... problem is that xbmc has other problems, like sucking up 75% of the CPU just to move to mouse pointer. Realtime decoding is nice and all, but if you can't take what's been decoded and send it in real time to the monitor, it doesn't do you much good.

There is a third approach, but it isn't as well known. There is a crystalhd plugin for xine-lib-1.2. Of course, Fedora ships with xine-lib-1.1.19... so a little bit of fun building xine-lib-1.2 and the crystalhd plugin, and crystalhd suddenly becomes usable on the 970015.

And is it EVER usable.... threw a whole bunch of h264's at it, no trouble with any of them. Next experiment, which I suspect will go perfectly smooth, is to throw some real high-bitrate BD content at it, and to clean everything up so that I can reproduce the software and settings, and to switch the heat-sink/fan on the CPU -- the one that came with the jetway mainboard (yeah, it actually came with one) is very nice low profile, but doesn't offer quite the surface area that I want, resulting in a higher than desirable fan speed... Finally, of course, have to show it off to everybody I can find

[trick0502]

finally got my case in tonight. i will be putting it together tomorrow. hope all goes well.

i have been running it on my main system on a second hdd (q6600, 4gb, 4870). it really flies on that, i cant want to see how it runs on the new hardware (athlon x2 250, 2gb, igp hd 4200).

[droidhacker]

You never actually said what you're doing about the video decoding. At one point, you said something about an nvidia card, and another point you said something about the AMD drivers (presumably blob drivers / xvba), and I've managed to pull this thread onto a crystalhd tangent

I presume that you've dropped nvidia from consideration since you're now talking about the 4200 IGP...

Note that the X2-250 you ordered should be able to handle interwebz-type 1080p content in software ok, but it would definitely need a multi-threaded decoder and would run the chip hard. The 4200 will have no trouble with playback using OSS driver, can't comment on xvba though since... obviously I have no use for it, nor interest in wasting time on blob drivers.

Note that the new release of mythtv has preliminary/experimental support for crystalhd, supports vdpau, does NOT (I think) support xvba or vaapi.

What hardware did you end up getting?

[trick0502]

so i ended up with a x2 250, 785g and 2 gb of ram. everything is running fine (even the remote), but i am have a little problem with hulu. when it is full screen it is a little choppy. i can play 1080p and 720p video without problems (mkv files). i wanted to try the amd drivers to see if they are any better but i cant figure out how to install them. can anyone help me?

[droidhacker]

so i ended up with a x2 250, 785g and 2 gb of ram. everything is running fine (even the remote), but i am have a little problem with hulu. when it is full screen it is a little choppy. i can play 1080p and 720p video without problems (mkv files). i wanted to try the amd drivers to see if they are any better but i cant figure out how to install them. can anyone help me?

hulu? Is that some web flash nonsense? You're probably running into adobe bugs rather than anything that can be fixed with a driver.

I wouldn't waste my time with blob drivers. You WILL end up having to wipe your disk to properly undo the damage it causes.

[Veerappan]

We use a dual-core Atom for the backend and a dual-core Atom + Ion for the frontend. That records and transcodes SDTV and plays HDTV so long as it's in a format the Ion supports.

So I'm sure an Athlon II and integrated graphics would be more than enough for SD, but I don't know whether it could play back highly compressed HD.



We got a cheap USB MCE remote, which works once it's going but sometimes we either have to reboot or wait five minutes before anything starts coming through from lirc. I don't know whether it's a problem with the Nvidia USB ports or the lirc driver.

Athlon II + Integrated is enough for SD, but depending on the video chip, but maybe not enough for HD flash.

Scenario:
Last summer I watched the Tour de France via HD streaming Flash on my Mythbox. The Mythbox hardware at the time was:
Athlon 64 x2 5000+ (2.6 GHz Black Edition)
4GB DDR2
780G motherboard
20+ Mbit/s download connection
Display was 1280x720 (720p)

I was using the open-source drivers, which meant no video decode acceleration (not that Linux flash supports it anyway). Halfway through the Tour, I ended up upgrading the CPU from the dual X2 (admittedly an older architecture) to a Phenom II x3 720 (2.8Ghz). Before the upgrade, I was getting some pretty bad choppiness, after was nice and smooth.

Video decode acceleration for HD videos will probably make or break a dual-core mythbox if you're using a 1080p TV. As far as MythTV is concerned, I don't know if it supports VA-API, or if it only supports VDPAU. If it supports VDPAU only, then you might need to use an Nvidia card. Depending on your budget, you could accomplish this by adding a fanless Nv card to a 780/785G motherboard. Possibly start with the integrated video, find out if the system is fast enough, and then add in the video card if it's needed.

As to the remote, I have a MCE USB receiver/remote, and the same symptoms as movieman. I did manage to fix them somehow, but it took some updating of drivers/packages to accomplish... and it's probably not the Nvidia ports that are causing this since I am running an AMD-based motherboard. I'd put money on the mceusb lirc drivers being quirky. That being said, my MCE remote has been very reliable once I got it running, and much less finicky than the Philips remotes that came with my Happauge cards.