xmbc-pvr + tvheadend = no crystalhd

Hi all,

I have an Atom 330 dual-core 1.6Ghz mobo. It came with a minipcie slot for the wireless card (which is pretty useless in Ubuntu 10.10).

As an experiment I put a Broadcom CrystalHD card in the minipcie slot to see if video performance would be better than the embedded nvidia chipset. To my surprise the Broadcom chip performed slightly better. I played back my movies in XBMC and 1080p/720p was slightly smoother and slightly sharper than the nvidia chip.

So far so good right?

Well once I tuned into tvheadend from xbmc, all the channels would not use the chd-h264 driver but instead use the ff-h264 driver causing a lot of jitter.

When I switch back to the ndvpau driver, I see the tvheadend channels properly use the ndvpau-264 drivers.

Is crystalhd not supported in tvheadend? Are there any plans for support?

I had similar problems.

Press i while trying to play live-tv - what is the audio codec?

Here in New Zealand it's AAC-LATM and the ffmpeg integrated with XBMC currently doesn't like it at all (completely unsupported as far as crystal HD is concerned) so therefore defaults back to ff-h264.

Cheers
Chris

the codec used is ff-h264. Movies, Youtube, all play chd-h264 (the crystal hd decoder) but tvheadend does not seem to support it.

please pastebin a full debug log. crystalhd should be included in the builds. did you enable it in the video playback settings?

Hi dushmaniac,

real dumb question but how do I find the tvheadend debug log file. All I can find is the xbmc.log in ~/.xbmc/temp/xbmc.log

http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/11496

+ "new" info (old 3 months) - it seem as problem with deinterlace, if i recording HD channel with Tvh and then running (.mkv) into Windows+Media Player Classic H.C. then no video,only audio - normal 720/1080 rips works with cHD perfect...

edit: Linux+cHD+XBMC+HD rip -> perfect

mythboy Wrote:Hi dushmaniac,

real dumb question but how do I find the tvheadend debug log file. All I can find is the xbmc.log in ~/.xbmc/temp/xbmc.log

I didn't mean tvheadend's debug log, I mean the one you posted

I'm having the same problems using live PVR with TvHeadend serving a HDhomerun.

Standard definition stations play fine, High-Def do not. I'm using an apple TV with the crystalubunutu image.

The *.strm HD channels from the HDHomerun play perfectly.


Is there solution/ work around for this issue. thanks.

jjhdtv Wrote:I'm having the same problems using live PVR with TvHeadend serving a HDhomerun.

Standard definition stations play fine, High-Def do not. I'm using an apple TV with the crystalubunutu image.

The *.strm HD channels from the HDHomerun play perfectly.


Is there solution/ work around for this issue. thanks.

One of the major letdowns the pvr addons have with crystalbuntu/ubuntu atm is that Live TV will NOT use your Broadcom cHD for hardware decoding, at least this is my case with addons xvdr and vnsiserver for a vdr master backend. Right now the only HD 1080 support is ffmpeg software decoding and this is not possible only 720p is possible but very high pc usage (90-100% in most cases). SD is just fine with a low pc usage deinterlaceer like "Blend"

I believe NA Satellite Streams are in MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC and the Crystal HD SHOULD support this format but it all comes down to the BCM Driver lacking implementation at the moment.

Crystal HD codec specs:

- H.264/AVC High Profile@Level 4.2 up to 40 Mbps (NA Satellite Stream Codec)

- VC-1 Advanced Profile@Level 3 up to 45 Mbps

- VC-1 MP@HL, VC-1 SP@ML, WMV9

- MPEG-2 MP@LL, ML and HL at up to 80 Mbps

- DivX® 3.11, 4.1, 5.X, 6.X, XviD

- MPEG-4 Part 2 SP & ASP

- AVS1-P2 Jizhun Profile, Level 6.0

The exact used codec should not matter: xbmc-pvr is able to exploit the crystal hd card playing the recordings of the vdr backend.