[TriLUG] MPEG Video Playback (was TV Tuner Card suggestion [may be OT])

[Josh Vickery]

My computer seems to be able to handle 1080i QAM streams without much
trouble and its specs are far less impressive than those of your
machine.

Core 2 Duo 1.8 ghz, 1 GB ram, Intel X3000 (G965) graphics.

It can also handle most 1080p sources, though some H264 encoded stuff
causes some framedrop, but not enough to bother me.

The mplayer commandline I (freevo) uses for watching live TV:

/usr/bin/mplayer -vo xv -ao alsa:device=hw=0.0 -fs -autosync 100
-nolirc -nojoystick -autoq 100 -screenw 1920 -screenh 1080 -fs -slave
"dvb://C113.1" -vf pp=de/fd -cache 1024 , poll=-1

Some of those, like nolirc, notjoystick, slave and poll are only
because mplayer is being controlled by another program (freevo).

For a recorded show:

/usr/bin/mplayer -autosync 100 -nolirc -nojoystick -autoq 100 -screenw
1920 -screenh 1080 -fs -slave -ao alsa:device=hw=0.0 -v -vo xv -cache
5000 //home/vickeryj/tv/12-13_20_00_It_s_a_Wonderful_Life.ts -vf
pp=de, poll=-1

The "vo" setting is one important source of trouble. Another is "cache".

Another possibility is that your hard drive isn't keeping up, running
"hdparm -tT /dev/harddrive" should let you know if there is something
going on there.

Occasionally I get corrupted streams and that causes all sorts of
horribleness, but that messes up the tuner in my TV as well, so I
don't think there is much to be done about that.

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 11:44 AM, Joseph Tate <dragonstrider at gmail.com> wrote:
> For all of you using HD capture cards, what do you use for playback.
> I keep thinking that my system will be fast enough to playback 1080i
> video, but even when I have a file size small enough to fit into RAM,
> I get video/audio sync issues, frame loss, and jitter.  Here are some
> sample files: if you don't have any:
> http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_HD-PVR#Samples
>
> My setup:
> CPU: Quad-Core 2.40Ghz
> RAM: 4GB
> GPU: nVidia Corporation G72 [GeForce 7300 SE] (rev a1)
> GPU Driver Version: 177.82
>
> I am also having issues with GeForce 7200 on an Athlon 3000+ with
> 512MB RAM with OTA.
>
> mplayer -vo xvmc errors out on my system, so I think I either have one
> of the Nvidia unsupported cards, or a misconfigured xorg.conf.
>
> Please also provide "extra settings" that you pass to mplayer/myth to
> get good playback.
>
> Joseph