[mrkrad]

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Con...aying_HDTV
also
XvMC (MPEG-2) HD:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC
^^ These guys posting their rigs and success of hd playback with mpeg-2 only not more advanced codecs.

It seems like the goal of XBMC Linux obviously is to play our favourite h.264 rips or xvid (probably not mpeg-2).

As i understand, the nvidia drivers barely support mpeg-2 in linux and doubtfully any h.264 or xvid?

I had to use the newest nvidia kernel (Envy built) to get my 8600 GT OC to work. I am starting to wonder if my boxen (1.8 core 2 duo, dual interleaved ram, sata II 300 ncq, 8600 GT OC) is going to be able to handle the raw power to play (audio/video/hardware overlay?) the popular formats.

Perhaps their info is old? Has anyone run some hardcore benchmarks on their systems showing 1920x1080p,1080i, 720P codec (x264/h264/xvid) using the player we are using to see if we're going to be happy with the results? Mpeg-2 is unreasonable due to size and the fact transcoding would suck time wise.

I think alot of people are here because HR-HDTV isn't cutting it any more and their xbox1 just can't handle high def playback.

What do you guys think? Thats why i'm here and i'd be glad to help but it would suck butt to build a whole machine only to find out our favourite formats and formats to come (let's assume 1080p h.264 in the next couple of years) are realistic.

I guess we'll need to rip some HD-DVD to h.264 (or free equivalent) and play it back at 720p and 1080p and see what kind of results or quirks we are getting.

Almost makes you wonder if vista using all the fancy video enhancements for nvidia G84(8xxx) or ATI would be an easier (money wise) platform.

Also i noticed the x64 seems to be used alot with MythTv and it enhances performance greatly. Getting things to run x64 probably way too far ahead at this time but if you just took our video player on such a platform we could compare the advantages (if any)?

I guess my fallback if the goals aren't realistic at this time would be a transcoding box that uses high bandwidth and low compression to feed the xbox1 high definition playback offloading the nasty cpu to a backend server?

I'm not savvy on all this high def stuff but perhaps someone could put together a benchmark many of us could test to see what kind of CPU load is needed to PASS/FAIL playing the modern formats? or perhaps that might just be some public domain videos we can encode and hand out here to give to others to see where their hardware stands.

If i'm way off base just tell me so but i do respect alot of the mythtv folks for already having figured out what sound card works (digital 100%) and sticking to nvidia for driver support.

Any thoughts?

[blackoper]

well since I'm using my system for highdef playback of hd-dvd/bluray and h264 encodes at 720p and 1080p I'll throw my thoughts in.
There is no hardware acceleration for anything other than mpeg2 in linux currently. Intel opensourced their drivers and there is a project to use the x3000 series and get some hardware offload worked out but that just started.
As far as playing high def content, your processor will be fine with everything but 1080p h.264. With that you will get some dropped frames most likely. Now what I have done is overclock my processor to between 2.4 and 2.8ghz (core 2 duo e2140) and i get no frame drops anymore. With mplayer now doing threaded h264 decoding overclocking may not be needed. I know xbmc linux isn't using mplayer, but it should be comparable.

[althekiller]

How about we get the linuxport up-to-date with the xbox version then start worrying about this shit? There is no sense running "hardcore benchmarks" on code that isn't close to finished.

720p works fine on my athlon xp 3000+ with old ass geforce4 mx440, so I don't see 1080* being a problem with current hardware.

[yuvalt]

How about we get the linuxport up-to-date with the xbox version then start worrying about this shit? There is no sense running "hardcore benchmarks" on code that isn't close to finished.

720p works fine on my athlon xp 3000+ with old ass geforce4 mx440, so I don't see 1080* being a problem with current hardware.

The resolution does not matter. The issue is with the bitrate.

[mrkrad]

i'm not dogging anyone dude dont get offended dude, but what i'm trying to figure out is once you add goodies (deinterlacing/etc) and all that jazz but if dude says e2140 needs more juice to play h264 to play 1080p, is the player that XBMC uses that much better/faster than mplayer?

The idea was to not have to switch to vista (which supports nearly all stages of the 8600GT h.264 acceleration). Could always port XBMC to vista j/k could run the same app on vista with 1/4 the power lol. j/k again

Just trying to be realistic. What video card do you have Blackoper ?

[Gamester17]

Any developers out there who is interested in hardware-accelerated video-decoding should read this article in the XBMC wiki:
http://xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.ph...o_Decoding

...but agree, the discussion is moot without an skilled developer¨willing to program this so try to lobby developers instead.

EDIT: Article updated by myself with news on Intel's new API which would probably be most integresting for XBMC Linux:

Future Intel Technology - Video Acceleration API (VAAPI)

A new video acceleration API is currently being developed, in an effort lead by Intel. This new API supports more complete offload (like VLD) as well as iDCT and MC, and can support acceleration of MPEG-4, H.264, VC-1, as well as MPEG-2. (Extending XvMC was considered, but due to its original design for MPEG-2 MoComp only, it made more sense to design an interface from scratch that can fully expose the video decode capabilities in today's GPUs). The website for this effort is: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/vaapi

The first public version of Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded (UME) Edition will possible feature this new API:

http://wiki.ubuntu.com/mobile-hw-decode
http://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+...-hw-decode
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/mobile-hw-decode-va-api
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/MobileAndEmbedded/Graphics
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/MobileAndEmbedded/MediaPlayer

PS! Without some kind of hardware-accelerated video-decoding, 1080p H.264 decoding will require very expensive/fast CPU.

[mrkrad]

It makes you puke to compare Vista (with some warez) ability to play high def right now today hardware-wise to linux. $300 boxen can do full 1080p with room to spare with vista. or spend 2x-3X as much in hardware for the OSS cause. I'm ready to spend 2x-3x but man. poopy. XBMC for vista almost makes sense sometimes. since they are practically giving it away these days lol.

For real gamester17, do you have anything solid hardware wise that in worst case (software render) would cover all the popular formats in 1080p and 720p. I think MKV h.264 is probably the most challenging, since most peepz here don't have the room to rip VC1/blu-ray (for backup purposes only of course).

throw me a bone on some options. I'd like to help (if only by debugging and helping others) and use xbmc linux. But i don't want to break the bank spending $1000 on a rig. remember the xbox1 was $100 a few years ago (pawn shop) now about $50. We gotta keep that in mind.

Heck if there was a way to send RAW video from a PC to Xbox1 xbmc in high def (transcoding) i'd sit it out but that just seems too easy huh.

I was hacking the ability to virtual ip into slackware way back in 92-93 so i don't mind getting my hands dirty but alot of this video stuff is way over my head versus simple c programming man.

[athurdent]

do you have anything solid hardware wise that in worst case (software render) would cover all the popular formats in 1080p and 720p. I think MKV h.264 is probably the most challenging, since most peepz here don't have the room to rip VC1/blu-ray (for backup purposes only of course).

assuming, that ffmpeg in linux does not use any of my nvidia 8600 gts gpu´s acceleration, my intel 6750 with a recent p35 chipset board and 2 gigs ram does the job fine. it´s max 60% cpu usage and wasn´t to expensive. could not really test with xbmc though, because lately i always get audio discountinuity errors and i had to use other players to test the hardware.
and as i wanted to play some 3d games, too, i have installed vista on the same machine. also 60% max cpu usage with every x264 mkv material i throw at it. running media portal (free windows xbmc clone) with ffdshow-tryouts-beta codec.

[mrkrad]

http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/443/4
good read.

btw if you'd score two (commercial) dll's you can setup mplayer to use ALL of the power of the 8600 or better yet the 2600xt ATI (its superior for GPU offload except in quality).

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1035182

try that setup with vista.32 and let me know how your gpu works. Nvidia does have beta-XP acceleration drivers now too but i hear they are flakey.

60% on both cpu's? gah i will have to overclock my e4300 mad to catch up with a 6750.

[bmfrosty]

Wouldn't hardware codec acceleration be done at the ffmpeg or x264 level? I'd think that all DVDPlayer/XBMC would need would be the ability to option the acceleration on or off depending on if the file being played back. And even then it would only need to be there in the need to fallback to software decode for instances where a more flexible software decode is desired.

[gaogao]

See my post with some benchmarks on non-accellerated HD streams playing here:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showpost.php?p=146...stcount=26

Cheers
Luigi

[blackoper]

I've also got a e4300 that had a hard time with mkv and h.264 1080p content before being overclocked to 3ghz. The new mplayer svn changes really helped. It seemed to make all the difference in the world. The p-threading patches are now using dual cores to decode h.x264 content. Smooth as butter for me now with all of my 1080p and high bitrate content.

In answer to the graphics, I'm running an onboard x950 intel chipset on my main media pc, but have run an nvidia pci-e 5300 with no problems on a previous system. I do have a 7900 gs in my main pc, but there is no difference in a high end card versus onboard or low end as the cpu does all the processing. I don't use xvmc as has been buggy every time I've tried to use it. I decided better to just overclock the processors instead and get perfect playback.
My full system specs are here:
http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/User:Blackoper

[blackoper]

Any thoughts?

Well I have a lot of different system experience to I'll go with what I have used so far. This is with Mplayer SVN checkout as of 9/08/07
This is testing with close to 30 different 1080p rips and hd-dvd and blueray complete rips - matrix trilogy and Sleepy Hollow. SVN mplayer made all the difference in the world. After the new p-threading changes that allow decoding to be multi-threaded I havn't noticed dropped frames in any content with the overclocked Intel chipsets. All hd-dvd and bluray tests are without sound due to no Eac-3 support yet.
All sound is digital passthrough. Video makes no difference. I use Intel onboard and nvidia pci-e cards. As long as you use something greating that pci cards you won't have high def video problems due to your graphics card. PCI doesn't have the bandwidth to push 1080p content to your display but it will work with 720p.

Stock intel E4300 processor - Nvidia 5300 pci-e - any video card - no cpu offloading
h.264 - 720p/1080i - pass
xvid - 720p/1080i - pass
MKV - 720p/1080i - pass
H.264 - 1080p - fail, too many dropped frames
xvid - 1080p - pass on most content
MKV - 1080p - fail
Bluray/HDDVD full rips (20GB+ each)- pass

Stock Intel E2140 - Intel X950 onboard
h.264 - 720p/1080i - pass
xvid - 720p/1080i - pass
MKV - 720p/1080i - pass
H.264 - 1080p - fail glitching and dropped frames galore
xvid - 1080p - pass on almost all tests
MKV- 1080p - dropped frames and glitching
Bluray/HDDVD full rips (20GB+ each)- pass

Stock Intel Pentium D 830 - Nvidia 5300 pci-e
h.264 - 720p/1080i - pass
xvid - 720p/1080i - pass
MKV - 720p/1080i - pass, dropped frames on some content/bitrate dependent
H.264 - 1080p - fail
xvid - 1080p - 50/50 depends on type of content and bitrate
MKV- 1080p - fail
Bluray/Hddvd full rips - a bit of dropped frames, but watchable

AMD Athlon 3400+ single core socket 754 - Nvidia 5300 pci-e
h.264 - 720p/1080i - pass
xvid - 720p/1080i - pass
MKV - 720p/1080i - pass, dropped frames on some content/bitrate dependent
H.264 - 1080p - fail
xvid - 1080p - fail
MKV- 1080p - fail
Bluray/HDdvd rips- some dropped frames

Overclocked Intel e2140 - 2.86ghz and overclocked E4300 - 2.97ghz
Pass on all current content including WMV 1080p imax films.

All tests are done using Fedora Core 7 64 bit. I also have Kubuntu 7.04 Feisty 64bit and it did fine with the e4300 chipset and nvidia 7900gs. 32bit Os's had problems for me. They just couldn't seem to handle the memory bandwith as well and also didn't do near as good decoding. In summary, use a 64 bit operating system if you can.