collectivity

For those of you who jumped the gun and requested a release-0-20 build, then subsequently upgraded your backends…

MythFrontend-MacOSXUniversal-0.20-fixes-20061001.dmg.bz2

Just a quick post to put these links up…

Some notes on these:

1. I cannot test these since I do not have a 0.20 backend.
2. They are built with all plugins and themes.
3. The Intel and Universal versions contain support for the remote on Intel hardware.

• MythFrontend-MacOSXIntel-0.20-20060913.dmg.bz2
• MythFrontend-MacOSXPPC-0.20-20060927.dmg.bz2
• MythFrontend-MacOSXUniversal-0.20-20060927.dmg.bz2

If someone has an opportunity to test these (particuarly the PPC and Universal) and let me know if they work properly, I would appreciate it.

Don’t forget on Intel hardware to turn on the vector optimized video output!

See the more recent article for more info and PPC/Universal builds

From MythTV release-0-20, Intel only.

MythFrontend-MacOSXIntel-0.20-20060913.dmg.bz2

From 0.19-fixes 20060407, includes remote patch for intel binaries.

Mythfrontend-0.19-fixes-20060407-universal.dmg.bz2

By popular demand:

Mythfrontend-0.19-fixes-20060407-intel-mmx-remotepatch.dmg.bz2

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