Koolu as MythTV frontend suggestions

[Jarod Wilson]

On Jan 30, 2008, at 9:46 AM, Jarod Wilson wrote:

>>> My own MythTV frontend[*] runs ratpoison, so I do still have a  
>>> window
>>> manager should I want to open an xterm, browse the web, etc., but I
>>> believe its memory footprint is something like 400k and it doesn't  
>>> do
>>> *anything* but manage windows.
>>>
>>> [*] core duo 1.66ghz mac mini, tiny, runs pretty much silent, and
>>> handles hdtv playback beautifully
>>>
>>
>> At only a few hundred more than the Koolu, that's a pretty reasonable
>> upgrade for a lot of improvement. Well, if the Koolu gets to be too
>> annoying (and it's really as much a tinkering project as an  
>> appliance)
>> I'll definitely look at the mac minis.
>
> Even better, the low end one is now a 1.83ghz core 2 duo. I still need
> to figure out if my mini can handle 1080p h.264 content or not...

Finally got around to some testing on this front. I tried xine,  
mplayer and mythfrontend, starting out first with 1280x720p h.264  
content. Well, mythfrontend failed miserably with h.264 content  
period, the audio was garbled and playback a bit jerky. mplayer fared  
a bit better. Audio is just fine, video is just fine, but there was a  
noticeable hitch in playback every 10 seconds or so. Interestingly, it  
isn't cpu-bound in either the mythfrontend or mplayer case, it just  
doesn't play back very well.

xine handled much better. 720p stuff is flawless, cpu usage is around  
65% of one core. I didn't really bother with anything but xine for  
1080p h.264 content, based on the 720p performance. Its *almost*  
there, but not quite. I get some noticeable stutter from time to time  
and occasional loss of A/V sync. The cpu usage fluctuates between  
about 98% and 105%, so I think it is indeed still the case that h.264  
decoding isn't particularly well multi-threaded. Once it is, it looks  
like a "lowly" core duo 1.66 can indeed handle h.264 1080p playback.  
Cool! :)

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com