Can I get video acceleration with Linux placeshifter?

[Chriscic]

Bummer there's no trial period for Linux placeshifter.

I've just started playing around with Ubuntu. Via mplayer, I can get smooth playback on pretty much anything except my HD-PVR files. I suspect if I could get video acceleration working (either with the internal Intel 4500 or the switchable ATI 3450) that will play smoothly too. I haven't quite achieved that yet, but it may be moot if there's no way to get any video acceleration via the Sage linux placeshifter. Is it possible? Is playback in the linux version even multi-threaded to take advantage of the second CPU core?

Thanks much.

[Chriscic]

Well, I am going to answer my own question here as best I can. Apparently Sage Placeshifter for Linux uses FFMPEG for video playback, therefore video acceleration is not in the cards at this time.

I have read that there are branches of FFMPEG in development that will support video acceleration, but I doubt those are usable today.

[ltburch2000]

Linux and mplayer do support video acceleration (this would be mpeg decoding acceleration). Just google VDPAU and you will see mention of this.

However the mplayer bundled with sagetv has been customized by frey so you can't just go and compile/obtain your own and replace their mplayer with yours.

So effectively this means for the moment, no mpeg decoding acceleration for sagetv under linux (works on windows). All the more reason to upgrade that processor!

I am not exactly sure how much processor you need to push how many pixels. I had an old AMD x2 4400 that was just slightly slower than what was needed to smoothly process 1080i HDTV. My i7 920 however runs practically at 0% with the same task.

Lee Burch

[bastafidli]

Mplayer is licensed under GPL
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/index.html
and Sage provides source code for their GPL licensed modified components.

[ltburch2000]

Do you know where they post the sources? It no longer really matters to me as I can run fine w/o acceleration but it would be nice to have a VDPAU build available for those with slower machines. Perhaps we could even convince them to incorporate it into the official build.

I hope they are up to date with the source, perhaps they branched a while ago and that is why they have not incorporated VDPAU.

Lee Burch

[jchisholm]

George at Sage very promptly provided me both the mplayer and their ffmpeg
source code so I'll take a shot at building in VDPAU support.
SageTV runs just great on my Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64b box.

[jchiso]

I was prepared to start a thread to ask this same question. I take it from the responses that this is not currently possible. How is it that an HD-100 or HD-200 can do it but a multi-core PC with HD-decoding chips cannot, particularly when the same system can under Windows XP?

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by jchiso

I was prepared to start a thread to ask this same question. I take it from the responses that this is not currently possible. How is it that an HD-100 or HD-200 can do it but a multi-core PC with HD-decoding chips cannot, particularly when the same system can under Windows XP?

Couple reasons... Windows has a built in, hardware accellerated multimedia API, that pretty much takes care of everything (just tell it to play 'this' file, and away it goes. The HD100/200, have specific silicon in them designed JUST for video accelleration, so basically, they just have to pass 'this' stream to them, and they take care of everything...

PC based Linux, on the other hadn, is far more 'complicated' to program HA on.

[storello]

I think I'm having a related issue. My WindowsXP box barfed for the last time and in a fit, I wiped it and installed Ubuntu 10.04. While my computer is old, and the video card (Nvidia FX 5200) is base level, it actually worked well in WindowsXP. Now it jitters so badly I can't really watch it using Placeshifter. It's not a show stopper, but it is pretty annoying since I had to plunk down the money to buy a whole new SageTV server for Linux. FYI, I also tried using the onboard VGA but, of course, that was even worse. Now that I'm using the Nvidia card, CPU max is a tolerable 80% peak while watching HDTV via Placeshifter, but the video still pauses at an annoying rate. Any suggestions?

[storello]

FYI: Broke down and replaced my video card with an NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 and all is good now.