MythTV ION Frustrations
I figured I’d post another update on where things stand with MythTV on Gentoo. It looks like cardoe is finding some time to work on 0.25, which is good to see.
Right now my setup has the backend on Gentoo, and my set-top frontend on MiniMyth. This is a bit of a pain as it is hard to keep these in sync, so I’ve been trying to get this box onto Gentoo to greatly ease upgrades and allow me to update the tree.
However, I’m still running into issues making the switch. I’m running into issues with HD video artifacts on my frontend, which is a Zotac ION-based ITX board. These artifacts can be substantial – lasting tens of frames, causing tearing, leaving large pink areas on-screen, and so on. When I watch the same videos on MiniMyth sometimes I see no artifacts at all, and at other times I might see noise that lasts a frame.
So, something on the Gentoo build is causing minor defects in the stream to result in much more substantial ones by the time they are rendered. The Minimyth build is clearly more error-tolerant.
Unfortunately, I’m not very familiar with the entire rendering chain so I’m not sure which libraries could be at fault. If anybody is familiar with VDPAU rendering and has some suggestions I’m all ears.
Here is a link to the software installed on Gentoo.
Here is a link to the software installed on Minimyth.
Rich0's Gentoo Blog 
Well, I’ve been tinkering further and mplayer handles the same source files fine, whether using xv or vdpau. So, I’m not convinced that vdpau itself is the problem here. It seems like the issue is either with the internal mythtv player, or with something it links to. I tend to suspect the latter as when I had bumped this box up to 0.25 it didn’t fix anything (I think it was 0.25, but that was a while ago).
rich0
June 23, 2012 at 6:44 pm
Hmm, another observation. I get the artifacts with nouveau. That seems to be pointing to something in mythtv itself, or in some lib before it gets to the display layer.
rich0
June 24, 2012 at 7:51 am