hdtv recording with mythbackend and fit-pc2?

Players, codecs, and video acceleration
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FiXion
Posts: 12
Joined: Mon Sep 07, 2009 7:13 am

hdtv recording with mythbackend and fit-pc2?

Post by FiXion »

Hi guys,

I'm using a fit-cp2 as a mythtvfrond+bacend right now and am looking to setup a decent backend system - with low power usage though.

I was wondering if the fit-pc2 could be used with the hauppage hdpvr box:
http://www.hauppage.com/site/products/data_hdpvr.html

?

If I install an SSD disk in the fit-pc2 - would this enable it to act as a mythtvbackend with f.ex. 2 HDTV tuners connected?

Or do you have any ideas for a low power, dual tuner, mythbackend box?

gmv100
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Apr 14, 2009 1:04 pm

Re: hdtv recording with mythbackend and fit-pc2?

Post by gmv100 »

The Fit-PC2 should be ample for running a HD backend, provided the tuner is doing the encoding. The tuner you linked to has hardware encode, so that should be fine. For comparison, I have an SD backend system running on a hacked Buffalo NAS, which probably has a tenth of the CPU and memory resources of the Fit-PC2.
What are you planning to use for the frontend of this system? Mythtv doesn't support VAAPI, so don't expect to be able to watch any HD content with it on the Fit-PC2.
My experience is that the Fit-PC2 is just fast enough to work as a SD backend and frontend, provided you don't use any fancy de-interlacing methods, but this is all done in software with no acceleration and there is not much headroom.

FiXion
Posts: 12
Joined: Mon Sep 07, 2009 7:13 am

Re: hdtv recording with mythbackend and fit-pc2?

Post by FiXion »

Thank you for the feedback.

Do you know if it can take two (or even 3) usb tuners at once? or is that too much for one SSD disk?

Btw. I'm running Ubuntu-9.04 and with mplayer-vaapi (and mplayer running with nice -n -10) I was around %89 idle when playing a 1080p movie. with regular mplayer it didn't play smoothly.

So it can do HDTV as a frontend as well.

gmv100
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Apr 14, 2009 1:04 pm

Re: hdtv recording with mythbackend and fit-pc2?

Post by gmv100 »

My system is running two USB tuners and the backend, streaming the captured data to an NFS drive on my NAS. This copes fine with recording 2 or 3 streams at once, even though the NFS drive is not that quick. Recording two streams and playing one stream is okay, although the system does stutter when the on-screen display appears.

My point about the frontend is that mythtv-frontend does not support vaapi. It uses ffmpeg, the same engine that mplayer uses, but it has its own branch of ffmpeg which has not yet been ported to take advantage of vaapi. So even though you can play HD content fine with mplayer-vaapi, you won't be able to with mythtv-frontend.

There has been some discussion on the Mythtv developer forums about supporting vaapi, but the idea has not been taken up by anyone yet. It seems that few hardware platforms support vaapi so there is little demand.

An alternative might be to run XBMC which is capable of acting as a replacement to mythtv-frontend. Somebody posted on here that it is possible to build this to use mplayer-vaapi, but I've not been able to find a way to do this.

FiXion
Posts: 12
Joined: Mon Sep 07, 2009 7:13 am

Re: hdtv recording with mythbackend and fit-pc2?

Post by FiXion »

Nice. Thank you for the feedback, it sounds viable :)

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