The next major iteration of MythTV was released a couple days ago.

The release notes list the new Mac OS X features as:

* New directory of OS X bundling tools
* Added MediaMonitor support
* Added digital audio support
* Compilation of MythMusic (playback only, no CD ripping) is allowed.
* Improved audio timestamp calculations
* Hardware Acceleration for HD MPEG2 using DVDV (Accellent) [Allows slower processors to play HD!]
* Improved FireWire recorder support


The DVDV thing is particularly interesting to me.. I didn't know this was still being developed. It's the Mac equivalent of Linux XvMC or Windows DxVA

I installed it, and it seems to work fine. The one problem area for me is that the video playback performance seems to be MUCH worse. My 1.66GHz Core Duo Mini used to play 1080i HD just fine, at approximately 80-90% usage of one CPU core. Now, the CPU is at ~ 135-155%, and playback is choppy. I will try to re-build, and make sure all relevant Mac optimizations are enabled.


Has anyone else upgraded to 0.21 yet?

...Has anyone else upgraded to 0.21 yet?
Next week. Are you running the backend on OS X? Any gotchas in the upgrade?

Craig

Next week. Are you running the backend on OS X? Any gotchas in the upgrade?
Craig

Yes, right now I'm running both the frontend and backend on my Mac Mini.. But, I run the MySQL DB and MythWeb on a separate Linux box.

The upgrade was pretty much seamless. My only problem is the video performance. I still haven't found video settings that get anywhere near the CPU usage of 0.20. Most settings take 130-160% CPU to decode HD video.

I recompiled with the Mac Video Acceleration enabled, and with that turned on 720p video looks very good, and takes about 50% CPU. But, 1080i doesn't play back at all - the video output is corrupted. So, this feature looks promising, but not ready for prime time.

After some more testing tonight, I found a patch to re-enable MMX under Leopard. After applying the mmx patch #2 from here: http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/4200 Video performance was back to expected levels.

After some more testing tonight, I found a patch to re-enable MMX under Leopard. After applying the mmx patch #2 from here: http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/4200 Video performance was back to expected levels.
Thanks for tracking this down. Hopefully they'll apply this to .21-fixes pretty soon.

Craig

Any chance you could post the patched binary somewhere?

Thanks,
Dan

Thanks for tracking this down. Hopefully they'll apply this to .21-fixes pretty soon.


I concur, thanks tji! I've been holding off on upgrading to .21 because of your timely warning. 1080i programs are a large proportion of what we record and watch.

Glad to help..

Someone from the MythTV mailing list offered to host it. I'm ftp'ing it to him right now. I'll post a link as soon as it's accessible.

Here is the URL he posted it at:

http://yoeu.net/~fa/mfe_0.21mmx.zip


I'm not sure how long he'll leave it up.

Let me know how it works for you if you try it.

Downloading as I type. I'll try it this weekend, thank you!

-Dan

UPDATE:

It immediately kicks me out with a "bus error" when started from Terminal. The unpatched Frontend starts fine, though I haven't been able to test it out due to database upgrade problems.

Are you running Leopard?

That version was built on Leopard, I'm not sure if there are version compatibility issues.

At least on other person confirmed they were using that file, so I don't think it's just corrupted.

I tried the binary from this thread, and it did execute on Leopard on my 24" iMac, it did not fix my frame skipping issues on HD content.

If anyone has HD playing smoothly at 1900x1200 on a Mac OS X 10.5, please let me know what settings you are using!

I tried the binary from this thread, and it did execute on Leopard on my 24" iMac, it did not fix my frame skipping issues on HD content.

If anyone has HD playing smoothly at 1900x1200 on a Mac OS X 10.5, please let me know what settings you are using!

Are you seeing this with 720p videos, or only 1080i? Other reports of this have been only with 1080i. There was a bug fix in 0.21 which I thought would address this problem. I had tested it on my parents 24" iMac, and it resolved the problem in MythTV 0.20. It was related to the aspect ratio detection, and associated video scaling. It would revert back to software scaling rather than letting the video card do it. At 1920x1080 pixels, that's a lot of CPU overhead.

Turn off "Scale Video as Necessary" in the TV Playback settings, and if this is the same issue, it should fix the playback.

Of course, for 720p video it will have black bars around the picture, and 480i/SD will look like a postage stamp.