Either UI2 very slow or HD Playback choppy

[donpaul]

I finally got a GeForce 6200 in my MD, and turned on UI2 masked. Everything works well so far except live tv in MythTV. Live tv looks great, but the problem shows when I try to use my gyro mouse to navigate channels, foward/rewind, etc. I have to wait a very long time for the menu to come up, and there is a big lag while moving through the menus. I also see the dreaded black boxes when I exit the menu. Everything is very responsive when controlling tv through the orbitor. I have tried a lot of the suggestions in the forum, but none seem to make a difference.

[donpaul]

I made the changes in the wiki. Disabled De-Interlacing, changed to libmpeg2, and enabled opengl. I also changed the hardware acceleration on the media director to opengl. I made sure vblank in nvidia-settings was on, and verified that useevents was true. Now the menu responds very well. The HD video is now very choppy and unwatchable. I have tried many combinations of the above setting, but can't seem to get good HD playback AND good menu response times. I have followed all advice on the wiki and on the other threads, with no success.

[Itsik]

Try to update the nvidia driver to the vary latest version.

Itsik

[donpaul]

I thought about updating the driver, but I'm using nvidia 6200 and from what I read in the wiki and forum, the latest driver will not make a difference and could break X. I did confim that with the MD hardware acceleration set to opengl, the menu responds perfectly, but HD video playback is very choppy. SD is also choppy sometimes, but barely noticable. With the hardware acceleration set to xv, all playback is smooth but the menus are slow, choppy, and leave the black boxes. I am still working on it and will post any findings.

[krys]

I have the same issue with my 6200, so far I have not come up with a solution, please do post if you figure it out.

[donpaul]

I switched to VGA 720p instead of component 720p; I can now play the high def movies and the menus are smooth. UI2 blended works very well too except for the tearing which I understand is expected. The only problem left... while watching live tv, the menus still take a long time to pop up and are slow to respond. I'm still working on that and will post again if any of the wiki/forum recommendations work.

** A thought for anyone wondering - VGA out can be easily converted to component, for those who do not have VGA inputs on their tv.

[seth]

 
Now I am not playing back HD content. Simply SD captured from my satellite receivers. However using pieces from the wiki on better video from pvr150 cards, I have noticed the following on my system:

By changing the following in mythtv settings > playback
change standard to libmpeg2
enable opengl

That was it and now my UI2-Masked is very quick and responsive, and very fast. So now all I need to do is figure out how to keep those changes on a router reload, and I am set.

A comment on HD. I was part of the knoppmyth project before coming to LinuxMCE.
When HD playback was first implemented, using nvidia cards, we changed the settings in mythtv > settings > playback to use

Bobx2  de-interlacing
and if necessary change the method from libmpeg2 to Standard XVMC

This dramatically improved CPU performance, and over all watchability.

However that was when the fastest CPU was 2GHz, and we were still using single core processors.
With today's hardware and a good nvidia card (6200 and up) I would think performance would be better.

Just my thoughts,

Regards,

Seth