Playback Profile Needed for 720p

[jamoody]

I just bought a new 3840 x 2160 (4K) TV and some shows playback fine and some terribly. Those broadcasting in 1080i, eg CBS, NBC, etc seem to be fine but those broadcasting in 720p, eg ABC, FOX, etc are a bit jerky. Freeform (pka ABC Family) plays back in double speed and the audio is 10 seconds behind. If I play the 720p content (including Freeform) in VLC it plays fine so I suspect the problem is the MythTV playback profile for 720p.

I likely hosed up my playback profile over the 8 years I've been using MythTV. I'm currently using:
if rez >=1920 1080 -> ffmpeg & vdpau with Advanced (2x, HW)
if rez >= 1280 720 -> vdpau & vdpau with Advanced (2x, HW)

Can someone please provide me your playback profile details for watching 1080i and 720p on a 4K TV. My (new) video card is NVidia GT 730 and I'm running 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo E8400 at 56% for 1 core (23% for the system) during 1080i playback so I think I have plenty of horsepower to work with. Thanks.

[pgbennett]

Here is a tip - if you have messed up your VDPAU playback profiles you can get back the defaults by deleting all VDPAU playback profiles, exiting, and going back into setup->playback. They will be added back with the default settings.

[jamoody]

It turns out that new NVidia GT 730 vdeo card doesn't have VDPAU, so it looks like I'm falling back to some default. Can someone tell me what playback profile options you are using for broadcast TV playback for 1080i (CBS/NBC) and 720p (FOX/ABC)? Thanks.

[daraden]

is vdpau enabled? check with

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mythffmpeg -buildconf |grep vdpau

this should return --enable-vdpau, if not you need to rebuild myth with it enabled or update to a myth version with it enabled.
is vdpau setup correctly? use vdpauinfo to check, also check hardware accelerators available to Myth.

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mythffmpeg -hwaccels

[jamoody]

I'm running Mythbuntu 12.04 so I didn't compile MythTV myself. mythffmpeg doesn't seem to like the -buildconf option but seems to display the build configuration anyway and --enable-vdpau is there:
$mythffmpeg -buildconf | grep vdpau
ffmpeg version 1.2.7 Copyright (c) 2000-2014 the FFmpeg developers
built on Jan 29 2016 01:20:54 with gcc 4.6 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5)
configuration: --compile-type=profile --prefix=/usr --runprefix=/usr --disable-mythlogserver --enable-crystalhd --enable-lirc --enable-audio-alsa --enable-audio-oss --enable-dvb --enable-ivtv --enable-firewire --enable-joystick-menu --with-bindings=perl --enable-ffmpeg-pthreads --enable-pic --perl-config-opts='INSTALLDIRS=vendor' --enable-libvpx --enable-sdl --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libx264 --enable-opengl-video --enable-vaapi --cpu=i686 --enable-mmx --enable-vdpau
libavutil 52. 18.100 / 52. 18.100
libavcodec 54. 92.100 / 54. 92.100
libavformat 54. 63.104 / 54. 63.104
libavdevice 54. 3.103 / 54. 3.103
libavfilter 3. 42.103 / 3. 42.103
libswscale 2. 2.100 / 2. 2.100
libswresample 0. 17.102 / 0. 17.102
libpostproc 52. 2.100 / 52. 2.100
Unrecognized option 'buildconf'.
Error splitting the argument list: Option not found

https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VDPAU and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo do not show GT730 as being supported (though GT 730M seems to be), or perhaps these web pages are just out of date. Interestingly, when I set the playback profile to
if rez > 1920 1080 -> ffmpeg & vdpau with standard decoder, vpdau, vdpau, advanced 2x, advanced 2x
I get smoother playback than
if rez >= 1920 1080 -> ffmpeg & XVideo, standard decoder, xv-blit, softblend, linearblend, linearblend
Same is true for
if rez > 1280 720 -> ffmpeg & vdpau with standard decoder, vpdau, vdpau, none, none

Also, with XVideo enabled Xorg runs at near 100% during playback and shows some tearing (?) at the top of the screen; with VDPAU enabled Xorg runs at about 1%. That seems to imply VDPAU is being used. I'm so confused!

[daraden]

both lists are incomplete, your gt 730 is a gk208 part supporting vp5(feature set D in your first link)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_700_series

is opengl an option?
have you set max cpus to 2?
any of the x11 options will generally produce poor results. the fact that xorg runs at 1% just means the x server is not being used, not that vdpau is working.
what do you get when you run the -hwaccels command? if you don't see Hardware acceleration methods: vdpau myth is not using it

your best solution to your numerous issues is to update to more recent software. is there some reason you can't or won't update?

[jamoody]

I'm running MythTV 0.27.5 and unfortunately mythffmpeg doesn't support -hwaccels at that level. I had planned to update to Ubuntu 14.04 and MythTV 0.28 in a few weeks so may have to do it sooner than later.
I guess opengl is an option, I really don't know the pros/cons of going to opengl.
I currently have max CPUs set to 1. I had tested it at 2 but didn't what the difference was.

I'll move the upgrade to the front burner and see what mythffmpeg -hwaccels tells me. Thanks for your help!

[pgbennett]

I suggest trying opengl if vdpau is not working well. Note that in order to use opengl for playback profile you must use opengl for theme painter. "Auto" for theme painter may also work if the "Auto" setting selects opengl.

[jamoody]

Thank you for the suggestion, I'll give that a try after the upgrade.

[jamoody]

Theme painter Auto and playback profile OpenGL High Quality does seem to provide a decent playback overall. Thanks for the suggestion.

I use VNC to remote connect to do recording maintenance (setup recordings, delete recordings, etc but not to watch recordings) and unfortunately the OpenGL (Auto) painter setting crashes the frontend. Until I can figure out a way around that (suggestions welcome) I'll have to do my recording maintenance on the local frontend (TV) instead of through VNC. I believe the TV session is using .mythtv directory and the VNC session is using .mythtv1. I wonder if there is a way to have a different theme setting in each of these directories.

[pgbennett]

To invoke the frontend remotely run this from a command prompt. You can do this from ssh or vnc:

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mythfrontend -O ThemePainter=qt

If you are using mythbuntu or ubuntu packages use mythfrontend.real:

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mythfrontend.real -O ThemePainter=qt

This overrides the OpenGL theme painter for that session only, preventing the crash caused by OpenGL.

[jamoody]

I'm running mythbuntu 14.04 and starting vncserver in init.d. Unfortunately it auto starts a pair of mythfrontend/mythfrontend.real in the VNC session as well so I need to figure out how/where to disable that while leaving the auto start of mythfrontend in the local (TV, non-VNC) session. Once I can get just the local mythfrontend to start I can use your suggested -O ThemePainter=qt option to manually start another mythfrontend in the VNC session when needed.

[jamoody]

I hacked mythfrontend.sh to not automatically start the frontend in a VNC session ("$DISPLAY" != ":0.0") . Then using -O ThemePainter=qt on a manual invocation in a VNC session allows the frontend to come up as suggested. Is there a way to override the playback profile from default of OpenGL High Quality to a non-OpenGL profile such as Normal? I couldn't find a playback profile keyword anywhere.

[jamoody]

See viewtopic.php?f=36&t=1584 for a a problem with Live TV showing a black screen with good audio on 720p channels.