HD client P4?

[Hunter69]

I have a older machine laying around plus some extra parts (I have a usb media center ir receiver). I currently have a windows home server w 1 hdhomerun, 2 hdpvrs. Is it possible to make a linux sagetv client, out of this old machine, that could play the H.264 tv recordings, bluray rips, dvd's etc? I was thinking of installing ubuntu. What do you think?

[Chriscic]

You won't be able to play h.264 on a P4. You could run placeshifter on it, but obviously quality will be degraded.

[doncote0]

BluRay minimum is around Pentium 4 541 (3.2 GHz), Athlon 64 X2 3800+ or above with memory requirements of 2GB (vista or later) or 1GB (XP). Not sure of the linux requirements, though. Sorry

I would try the suggestion made above and use placeshifter with reduced settings.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by doncote0

BluRay minimum is around Pentium 4 541 (3.2 GHz), Athlon 64 X2 3800+ or above with memory requirements of 2GB (vista or later) or 1GB (XP). Not sure of the linux requirements, though. Sorry

I would try the suggestion made above and use placeshifter with reduced settings.

It depends... For *sagetv* a P4 wouldn't cut it for a bluray rip because AFAIK, the mplayer used by sagetv does not support Nvidia's VDPAU. For XBMC, Boxee, MythTV (eg, nearly everything else) where VDPAU is supported, you could use a P4 for bluray rips, as long as you have a sufficiently new/capable Nvidia GPU.

My 1.6GHz Atom CPU in my Ion is 90% idle when playing BD rips in MythTV and in Boxee..

Drew

[doncote0]

Good points...Hunter69's ability to use it could also be affected by the video card, drivers and codecs used...

For example, my Radeon HD 5750's each support hardware transcoding of (2) 1080P signals simultaneously. Most of that horse power comes from the video card itself.

How did you make your BD rips (program used)?

[drewg]

Originally Posted by doncote0

Good points...Hunter69's ability to use it could also be affected by the video card, drivers and codecs used...

For example, my Radeon HD 5750's each support hardware transcoding of (2) 1080P signals simultaneously. Most of that horse power comes from the video card itself.

How did you make your BD rips (program used)?

I use makemkv to "backup" the disk to HD. I mostly use an HD100 media extender, so that adds to the complexity. Since the HD100 cannot handle the sophisticated DTS audio on some BDs (all Disney/Pixar ones I've tried so far), I use ClownBD running under Windows in VirtualBox to convert the audio tracks to AC3. I'd love to find a native linux way to convert the audio to AC3. Other BDs I own (BBC Planet Earth) don't have this issue.

Are you actually making any use of your video card's horse power in linux..?

There are 2 competing HW video decoding packages in linux - VDPAU, and VAAPI. VDPAU is NVidia-only, and has broad support. Most video applications (except for SageTV ) support VDPAU, and most recent distributions ship VDPAU enabled libs, drivers and apps. VAAPI is a more open API, and is available for different vendor's cards. However, since it does not have a major company pushing hard for it, it does not have widespread support. To use VAAPI, it seems like a matter of downloading beta drivers from here, applying application patches from there, and getting a libva from somewhere else, and crossing your fingers and hoping it all works.

If I was putting a system together to play BD rips, or even just getting a new video card, I'd go with Nvidia. It supports VDPAU today, and if VAAPI ever takes over, it should support that as well.


Drew

[doncote0]

If I was putting a system together to play BD rips, or even just getting a new video card, I'd go with Nvidia. It supports VDPAU today, and if VAAPI ever takes over, it should support that as well.

Well that is too bad about VDPAU...I do not know anything about that technology. I see that the Radeon HD 5XXX series supports Linux, but I do not know how well.

In Windows 7, it performs very well. My (2) Radeon HD 5750's in CrossfireX outperform most NVidia high end cards while using less power and generating less heat and noise (they're very quiet). Native hardware support for many of the things that other cards due through software is a bonus.

I originally was going to go the NVidia route, but reviews across many different websites convinced me otherwise. I am happy with my solution, and I hope you are happy with yours.

[doncote0]

After talking to one of my Linux friends he explained a few things about NVidia and ATI in relation to Linux.

Linux supports NVidia and NVidia supports Linux very well. You might say they are friends.

Linux can work with ATI and ATI grudgingly supports Linux. You might say they are grudging acquaintences, but neither would lose any sleep if the other got hit by a bus.

NVidia routinely releases parts of their code to Linux and vice-versa which makes the driver stability and efficiency very high shortly after product release. ATI doesn't have that relationship with Linux, so the opposite affect seems more likely.

Too bad for ATI...and probably more than a little short-sighted.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by doncote0

Linux supports NVidia and NVidia supports Linux very well. You might say they are friends.
<...>

This is something of a misconception.

In general, the Linux community, *especially* the linux kernel folks, are rabidly pro- open source, and pro GPL. These folks hate Nvidia with a passion because of the way they do their drivers -- When you "build" an official NVidia driver for linux, what you're building is a small shim layer that translates linux kernel APIs to what Nvidia's core driver needs. This core driver is *not* open source, and is provided as a "binary blob". Pretty much the same blob is used on other OSes, but with a different shim layer (eg, for solaris, or bsd..). They rely on as little of the linux native features as possible, and work with older kernels/distros. There have been debates whether or not what Nvidia is doing is actually compatible with the GPL (since they're linking a binary blob to a GPL binary).

Nvidia has never given the linux community access to the documentation it needs to create its own drivers. As a response, some people have done a lot of work to reverse engineer the Nvidia drivers (trapping register access, and such). This project is called Nouveau. Using this, you can maybe get the same performance as a 6 year old mid-range card using a high-end card from today.

Further, Nvidia has its own way of doing things, which usually precedes the open way by a few years (VDPAU , multiple monitor support, on-the-fly resolution changing, etc).

ATI has their own closed source drivers, which are terrible. ATI has also sporadically released documentation, and there are open source drivers for ATI cards. However, they rely on incomplete docs, and rely on the "open" way of doing this, which lags Nvidia by years. Worse, since they're open source, they care only about bleeding edge systems.

As a case in point, I'm typing this on a Hardy 8.04 box with integrated ATI graphics. The graphics support sucks horribly (ATI drivers tear HD video and are unstable, open source drivers are stable, but only offer decent acceleration on newer kernels). If I had gotten an Nvidia based board, I'm pretty sure their drivers would still support me.

At any rate, this is a case in point where a focused closed source solution from a single source is clearly superior to the open source ones..

Drew