collectivity

I used to run my mythbackend/frontend on an Athlon XP @1733Mhz. It was mostly able to keep up with 1080i using Bob deinterlacing, and could easily do 720p.

With a recent switch of hardware to an Athlon 64 @1800Mhz on an Asus A8V motherboard, the hardware has been using 92% or more CPU to play 1080i using Bob deinterlacing, and 60-65% CPU to play 720p…

Given the old 32 bit hardware was doing the same job almost as well, I found the performance unacceptable. Because the high CPU usage for 1080i with Bob deinterlacing was causing glitching issues, I switched over to linear blend deinterlacing and saw a drop to about 70% CPU for 1080i. While this wasn’t the ideal solution, it at least kept me from going nuts for a while.

Today a user on irc.freenode.net #mythtv-users suggested I boot the machine using the “noapic” kernel option. What this does is disable the APIC interrupt routing. Immediately, I noticed a difference. Playing 720p only used 35-40% CPU and playing 1080i with Bob deinterlacing only used 55-60% CPU.

It may not be the long-term solution, as I believe there are benefits to having a working APIC configuration, but at least for now it has made using the mythfrontend much smoother and less temperamental.

So if you’re seeing overly high CPU usage during playback, check to see if APIC is being used, and if so, change your kernel command line parameters to include “noapic”. You can do this by editing the appropriate line(s) in /etc/lilo.conf and running lilo, or editing the /etc/grub.conf or /boot/grub/menu.lst file and adding the parameter to the appropriate line(s).

I needed to upgrade my MythTV backend to the release-19-fixes branch from SVN in order to solve an issue with timeouts to the MySQL server (see: mythtv-users thread). As part of the upgrade, I went ahead and built .19-fixes (checked out 20060407) frontends for Mac OS X PPC and Mac OS X Intel (MMX enabled).

Here are the links:

• Mythfrontend-0.19-fixes-20060407-ppc.dmg.bz2
• Mythfrontend-0.19-fixes-20060407-intel-mmx.dmg.bz2

And for those running older backends, I still have the binaries I built for .19 and .18.1 sitting around:

• Mythfrontend-0.18.1-ppc.dmg.bz2
• Mythfrontend-0.19-intel-mmx.dmg.bz2
• Mythfrontend-0.19-intel.dmg.bz2
• Mythfrontend-0.19-ppc.dmg.bz2

See the updated version

I’ve recently been using GimpShop under Mac OS X. There is a plugin for Gimp called UFRaw that I wanted to use as well for RAW file import from my digital camera.

Update…
So I took up the challenge from the UFRaw author and built a point/click installer. It works for Gimpshop.app, so long as it is installed as /Applications/Gimpshop.app. I am looking into getting a script into the installer that can determine where Gimpshop.app or Gimp.app is located, and allow the user to select it for installation.

I’ve built a Java-based HTML image gallery generation program which is highly flexible in the type of HTML output it can create. It’s called HtmlGallery, and you’ll certainly see its output in use here at goof.com for image galleries.

I’ve built a TWAIN to TIFF file batch scanning utility. It’s called TwainTiffBatcher. It grabs images from a TWAIN datasource and writes them to disk as TIFF files, rather than keeping them in memory. This is useful for scanner drivers that do not support writing to files. It supports B&W, 8&16bit grayscale, and 24&48bit color image types.