Notices

Probably be useful giving a heads up on the users list as well. There are a lot of people on there who don't look at the dev list much or at all (like myself).

Good point, I sent a post, although it's waiting for approval because I'm not subscribed to the users list.

Just some feedback.

Been playing with the transcoding settings, and 400x240 with the video bitrate set to 900-1000, and mp3 quality set to 8 or 9 seems to be the maximum playable video size at the minute. Trouble is that that looks fairly ropey on the TV, as it is very jumpy and "shimmery". I'm in the UK, and 240 is not quite half PAL size (which is 288). Going to fiddle (sorry experiment) with deinterlacer settings etc to see if I improve things.

Mplayer will play 624x352 at 1000kbps, with just the occasional fractional pause, and it looks great on a regular TV,so I'm hopeful that with some code optimizations we can get there.

Also, I have lost screen borders and scrollbars twice after a myth crash trying to play to high a video. The most obvious is the loss of the up/down buttons on the application menu, and the borders around the "keys" on the virtual keyboards. I could not find any resolution to this the first time other than re-flashing the device, and put it down to coincidence. Now it has happened again, I'm going to try removing myth, and resetting the device.

For me it's not a huge problem, but it is something to be aware of if people are going to use this.

cheers

gaz

I've uploaded a new version of mythtv (0.21-maemo1), which supposedly has the cpu optimizations built in finally. Let me know if you notice any differences.

https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=632

The good thing is mplayer and mythtv share common code for the decoding part (both use libavcodec from ffmpeg) however the videoout code is different. So I may try copying in mplayer's libavcodec, and if that doesn't work I may just add a "mplayer" playback method.

well it's now playing a file encoded at 624x352, with a bitrate of 600. granted it's pausing for a fraction of a second at regular intervals, which looks to be buffering, but it's now playing which is a big improvement. Going to drop the resolution, and increase the bitrate a bit.

I let you know how I get on.

gaz

Hey people, does anyone have the deb to attach here? maemo.org is down and I'd really like to update the myth package to see if I can get video work without transcoding my current myth recordings. if not, I'll just wait it out.

Thanks!

nevermind it is back up

Just to follow up. I'm currently back to mpeg4 400x240 with vbitrate set to 900, and it is perfectly watchable. I have enabled virtual memory, and DISABLED realtime theads in the playback settings, as it seems to reduce momentary freezing, and the video is more watchable, seems fine, although it is still rubbish on the big screen.

I have come across an article on the myth wiki about transcoding for the N810 which suggests 512x304 mpeg4 with a vbitrate of 600, so I'll give that a go.

Is anyone else using this in anger, or have people just installed it to test and then put it one side? the only thing with me is that currently my transcodes run at about twice real time if the box is overwise idle, which is irritating if I don't want to wait.

The fact that your doing this is really really cool. Maybe I should give more thought into seeing if I can get sagetv's placeshifter to run on the tablet.

I wrote that wiki article a few weeks ago, when I was playing with Canola to try and get my MythTV stuff to play in there.

How is it working in MythTV? I haven't even been able to get the .deb's to install on my N810.

David.