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Old thread i know but if anyones interested.
To the some of the posts in this thread:
Onkyo 606 horrible hdmi board faults warranty repair didnt even fix mine properly i had it replaced with a pioneer which then later had incompatiblities with my new tv at certain refresh rates so then i got that replaced with the onkyo 608.
Core i3 handshaking issues, try a longer HDMI cable it will fix some things.
Now as for my little problem. I've got a core i3 530, 1x2Gb stick, latest XBMC beta that was just released (scrapping no longer lags which is good and it has many other bug fixes over the previous nightly's, very happy with it), however although the latest beta has improved performance with dxva and windows 7, i find some 1080p movies i have. District 9 and Dark Knight to be exact at certain high bitrate points it will drop frames and the gpu hits 100% usage. Is this the ff-h264 decoder not being efficient enough? Or possibly Intel drivers need improvement. Maybe its an x264 encoding setting thats just pushing the GPU to hard? Everything else plays fine, blurays and 720p etc.
Anyway does anyone else have issues with the gpu just not seeming to be powerful enough for ALL variations of x264 encoded movies?
Thanks for any help
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I haven't noticed any issues with either of those two movies on my i3 530?
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Is anyone successfully using Core i3 based HTPC with Linux version of the XBMC? It seems for this release cycle it will be Lucid based and from what I understand 2.6.35 of Maverick is required. Is anyone distributing packages for Maverick already compiled with libva to support VA-API?
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My personal opinion is that Intel is gumming up the works, and Nvidia keeps setting a faster pace.
From my understanding the basic holdup with VAAPI is that its not stable enough yet. I mean the actual VAAPI API is stable, there is no problem there. What instead is the problem is that it has been hard to make it so that the many different types of hardware covered work well.
And I really blame Intel for that.
It was their GPU group that could never make a decent GPU so that they had to license that PowerVR tech. The first video platform to make the best use of VAAPI was the GMA500 from Intel powered by the PowerVR, and it was full of proprietary tech that made the driver very closed off. Which it had to be, because Intel's GPU arm failed at its mission in life. The GMA 500 is a monster.
That was a big problem because up until that point (and still really) Intel was doing a LOT of heavy Xorg lifting. I mean whoever employes Mr. Keith Packard owns the majority share of Xorg as far as I am concerned. And for a while the synergy was great- until the big AMD source dump open source GPU hardware meant Intel.
But then they release this closed off monstrosity that has the features we need behind a gilded gate. And so suddenly VAAPI ran into the NVidia problem- the only drivers that worked for it for a while were closed!
The Nvidia problem of course is that if you have closed drivers then its impossible to figure out if a Xorg problem is in Xorg or if its in the driver.
Nvidia gets around this problem by hiring Xorg wizards to fix all the problems: When VDPAU was released Nvidia didn't just wait for the community to work it in, they released a patched Mplayer with it. That is how Nvidia rolls.
But this problem was new for the open source side of the Xorg driver community. And it wasn't the only problem.
There was a lot of infighting over whether XvMC should be extended or a new thing rewritten. Also the open source drivers have pretty much redone memory management in the last few years (plus all the composite work) so even without VAAPI there is tons of more basic things to work on.
In that environment, Nvidia didn't stand still. VDPAU based color correction, sharpening, and de-interlacing was added. In newer Nvidia GPUs, divx upscaling was added. They kept cranking out hit after HTPC hit to a very receptive audience. We can't get enough ION!
Nvidia VDPAU delivers more today that it seems that VAAPI will deliver for a while, which makes it a tempting option for practicalists. Also you can bet that Nvidia will keep rolling out the good stuff (Maybe HD Audio bitstreaming in the 4xx series?) which makes them a safe bet for the future....