[ubuntu-mythtv] XvMC gone

[Eloy Paris]

Hi Mario,

Thanks for the reply.

On 12/03/2010 09:31 AM, Mario Limonciello wrote:

> Eloy:
>
> You're the first person to raise any concerns about this.  Also the
> first person I've heard in that XvMC actually functions on 0.24.  My
> understanding is that it's only stable with the older NVIDIA drivers.

That's actually what I use, the old NVIDIA drivers (if I could use newer 
drivers I'd be using VDPAU ;-) ). In fact I have not upgraded my Myth 
machines from 10.04 to 10.10 because this one frontend has this old 
NVIDIA card, and 10.10 shipped with no support for the old NVIDIA cards 
(this is in the process of getting fixed, though, so I may be upgrading 
to 10.10 soon).

It's been stable for me and something I would add is that I don't think 
I was ever able to get XvMC to work on something other than NVIDIA 
hardware (I tried on Intel hardware with no success). So, the issue of 
XvMC giving non-NVIDIA users trouble is probably not new. That it is not 
stable with newer NVIDIA drivers is news to me, though.

> With how frequently the crash reports were coming in, it sounds like you
> are certainly in the minority.

Possibly, although it is worth noting that the "breakage" caused by 
removed XvMC support may not be easily noticed -- in my case I had a 
playback profile that only used XvMC (no fallback) so when XvMC was 
removed the frontend would just display a black screen. Normally people 
would have a playback profile that has fallbacks, so if XvMC is not 
available something else would be used. So, more people may be affected 
and they are just noticing it.

[...]

> As much as i'd love to make everyone happy, I'm currently leaning on
> keeping XvMC off.

It's your call for sure. To me it seems a bit heavy-handed to turn off 
support for something that can be disabled by a simple configuration 
change (and documented so those running into the issue know how to 
workaround it). But I'd understand if I am one in a handful of users 
that still depends on the feature.

Given that XvMC will be gone in 0.25, and that it is already gone in 
0.24 in Mythbuntu, this seems like a good time to ask in the 
mythtv-users mailing list who is still using XvMC since I am now curious 
to get a sense of how many people still have old hardware that forces 
them to rely on XvMC. As I said, XvMC was about 3 years ago what VDPAU 
is today in terms of "coolness" so it surprises me that things have 
changed so much in perhaps so little.

 > Once autobuilds are re-enabled, I would be glad to
> help teach you how to set up a local autobuild repository based off of
> all of our packaging scripts and what not however so that you can still
> have XvMC enabled builds for yourself on 0.24.

My preference would be not to have to recreate locally the autobuild 
infrastructure that already exists, but that is certainly an option. 
Instead of helping me to setup my own autobuild infrastructure, what 
about documenting it somewhere so others can benefit as well? I am sure 
this will not be the last time that someone will want something that is 
not enabled in the Mythbuntu packages, so having documentation on how to 
setup an autobuilder seems like a good thing.

Cheers,

Eloy Paris.-