710 Software Raid & Playing .M2TS Files

[Beeker]

Help
I have just built my Linuxmce PC using 710 and all works well, just have a couple of small niggling issues that others with more experience could help me over the line with as the wife is complaining about me staying up all night and googling forums.

I have set up a software raid in 710 which is working ok, the only issue I am having is saving photos and videos to userxx folders, when I drill down via the web admin i.e
> home
    > user_2
        > data
            [ videos ]
                > Raid Array [26]
I can see this structure, when I use a windows pc with content I have on it and browse to the linuxmce pc I get presented with the home and my user folder which I then click on and then the Raid Array folder and copy the content into that folder. Problem is that when I go back to the Linuxmce MD in the living room and check my folder there is nothing there, I made sure to do a resync as well.......any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Also the other issue is that when I copied HD quality .m2ts home videos into the public video folder then play either from the core/hybrid or on the other MD they are slightly choppy and have interlacing lines............currently running NVIDIA 7600GS cards in both PC's with 2GB ram......they play okay on XP pc and over the network to a TVIX 5130. I have tagged them as LinuxMCE Bluray files which made a slight improvment, plus I have updated the NVIDIA drivers to the latest ones from the NVIDIA web site as per one of the wiki instructions

Kind regards
Bruce

[colinjones]

on the m2ts files, it is highly likely they are X264/H264 video codec with a significant bit rate. These are very heavy duty codecs, and given that there is NO video decode acceleration in 0710 (doesn't matter which GPU you have, the old video driver from nVidia provides no access to that function) you would need some pretty heavy duty CPU-iron to get this smooth. In 0810 (which you should really be using anyway as 0710 is end of line, and no longer supported) there is an experimental VDPAU option you can set up - VDPAU is the new nVidia driver that provide access to the video decode hardware on Linux systems. But only if you have an 8xxx or 9xxx series GPU. This would also solve any deinterlacing requirements you had. BTW, you can turn on various forms of software deinterlacing in 0710 in the web admin, however that will suck up even more CPU.

[Beeker]

Thanks Colin for the great advice much appreciated, I was always wondering if I should upgrade to 810 or not.

I am planing to upgrade to 9000 series in the next couple of weeks and I have been testing different deinterlacing modes which made a slight improvement. From your experience can I ask what is the best and simplest way to upgrade to 810, I have made a current backup using web admin should I use this once I do the upgrade?

Cheers
Bruce

[colinjones]

There are too many fundamental differences between 0710 and 0810, so unfortunately there is no upgrade path. On the upside, any metadata you have set for your media is stored either in an ID3 tag file, or in an embedded ID3 tag, so that once you rebuild, LMCE will scan all that information back into the library once you have built 0810.