HD Video Playback on iBook G4

Published at October 5, 2008 in TechnoGeek. 0 Comments

I’ve been upgrading the MythTV server in the basement. I still have the Hauppuage card, so NTSC works fine. But, its time to havs some HDTV… I have to prepare for the transition.

I purchased a pcHDTV 5500. It was plug and play to get it work, I did upgrade the MythTV Software to Mythdora 5, as well. Everything went very smoothly.

I am now a month into recording, and testing. I love being able to encode HD. the image is beautiful. Playback however is somewhat troublesome. It’s Apple’s fault… Here’s why.

When I run Mythfrontend on my iBook G4, I get really crappy playback, dropped frames, choppy audio. It just doesn’t work.

From my testing, transcoding the video to 1024 pixels wide, and 2.2Mb/s seems to do the trick. I can try different sampling rates, but this works just fine.

When i play an HD stream on my laptop, I get cpu utilization of 100%. So the machine’s processor is doing all the heavy lifting. What kind of video card is in an iBook? A Radeo Mobility 9200, of course. It turns out that this card has a built in MPEG2 decoder. This means that the machine is perfectly capable of HD playback.

Now the question becomes - what do I do to enable the use of that hardware?

in Mythfrontend, I chose MacAccellerated, and quartz-opengl for the video playback drivers. The way I understand it, this should enable the graphics hardware to playback the MPEG2 stream.

Tiger uses a Cocoa component called CoreImage to manage the display. So, is CoreImage being used on this machine, and with this card?

So, I fired up System Profiler, and clicked on Graphics/Displays - here’s what i got:

Chipset Model:    ATY,RV280M9+
Type:    Display
Bus:    AGP
VRAM (Total):    32 MB
Vendor:    ATI (0×1002)
Device ID:    0×5c63
Revision ID:    0×0001
ROM Revision:    113-xxxxx-142
Displays:
Color LCD:
Display Type:    LCD
Resolution:    1024 x 768
Depth:    32-bit Color
Built-In:    Yes
Core Image:    Not Supported
Main Display:    Yes
Mirror:    Off
Online:    Yes
Quartz Extreme:    Supported

Notice the report says Core Image is Not Supported. Bummer. This means I have no way of taking adavantage of the MPEG decoder in the card. That is, unless there’s something I dont know. I’ve looked around a little, and it seems like access to that component is not allowed.

Why would Apple NOT provide complete access to the card’s internals? It would make this completely serviceable machine USABLE, no?

7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable

Published at September 26, 2008 in Geek Therapy and Rants. 0 Comments

From Cracked.com
How many of your friends have you only spoken with online?
Some days, the Internet reads like humanity’s huge, whiny suicide note. Here’s why.

tech fails me

Published at September 24, 2008 in Rants and WTF - Daily Diary. 0 Comments

When the smoke detectors battery fails, it’s always at 4AM.
Me: “zzzzzsnnnnrkk”
Beep
Me:”huh…zzzzsnrrrkk”
BEEP
Me:”aw hell, wtf is beeping?….zzzzsnrrkrrkk”
BEEP
Me:”mutherf*ckin som-b*tch goddam sh*ta$$ smoke alarm….crap”
BEEP
Stumble out of bed, find which of the 3 smoke alarms is beeping, wonder what the hell, since they are tied into the electrical of the house…oh it’s a backup battery…extract battery
BEEP
Remove smoke alarm from ceiling, disconnect from power…
BEEP
Me:”Huh? It’s go no power?”
Beeeooop…clck…bzzz…

Of course, by this time the cats have figured out that I am up so it must be time to feed them so they run back and forth, up and down the hallway, I guess they were playing tag or something. All I know is that I was trying to go back to sleep at the same time that they decided my feet were home base.

Next up, the damn Ford Motor Co jingle resumes running through my head, reminding me that it is “Time to drive a Ford, again”. I have had this jingle in my head for 2 days now…

Cat one catches cat two and much tussling, hissing and flopping about ensues.

It’s time to drive a Ford again.

………….grrr……….

Oh hell, I might as well just get up.

The Beeb and the Box

Published at September 9, 2008 in Geek Therapy and Travelogue. 0 Comments

The Box“The Box is an ambitious and unique year-long project for BBC News to tell the story of international trade and globalisation by tracking a standard shipping container around the world. “
This is cool on a bunch of levels, and you can track the container in real time.

Pretty spiffy. I hope it comes through Pittsburgh so I can get a picture of it.

Lawyer Pron

Published at September 8, 2008 in Uncategorized and WTF - Daily Diary. 0 Comments

If ever wondered where all those gossip sites (The Superficial, Perez Hilton, Popoholic, etc.) get their scoops?
From the Courthouse News Service. Interesting stuff from the litigious side of the law.

Longest drive in the world.

Published at August 25, 2008 in WTF - Daily Diary. 0 Comments

OMFG, these guys are driving from the UK to Alaska, by way of Russia and across the Bering Strait. Cruising along in a highly modified Land Rover, they recently crossed over the Bering Strait into Alaska. There is a great gallery of the crazy vehicles these guys have been using on their site.
They will probably have a bit of a rough time with the Darien Gap, though.
I have been thinking about organizing a drive from Pittsburgh to the Arctic Circle, just because I can.

Graphing fun for numbers geeks

Published at May 22, 2008 in TechnoGeek and WTF - Daily Diary. 1 Comment

Nothing boils a bunch of complex data into a tasty nugget of info like a well created graph. Us geek love graphs, and really, how else could anyone comprehend something as complex as web traffic?
From the folks who brought you countless LOLcats, comes a fun site where pop culture and graphs meet to make some great visual puns.

more song chart memes

Ubuntu to you too! Verdict…good to go.

Published at February 18, 2008 in TechnoGeek. 3 Comments

So, I decided to quit pirating operating systems and installed Ubuntu on a slightly more modern laptop. It rocks. Hands down. It found all the funky parts of the hardware, including a slightly non-standard Cisco WiFi card. No problems at all. Now I am in the middle of finding fun games and stuff to fiddle with.
I am not going to join in with the fanatics, yet I think that this will give the folks in Redmond, and Cupertino, something to look out for.

DCC and SystemImager

Published at January 21, 2008 in TechnoGeek. 0 Comments

I have installed Debian Sarge, and the DCC components. I’ve gotten through most of the setup instructions for DCC.I’m at step 3.4 Deploying the image on work nodes.dcc_discovernode worked well enough. But now I’m trying to get the node to acquire the boot image. And this is proving to be challenging. mkautoinstalldiskette has been renamed to si_mkautoinstalldiskette.Whats more, it’s designed for kernels that will fit on a floppy. The kernel that it is trying to copy is 1.72MB, too large to fit. This kernel again, came bundled, and I really dont know how to re-build it so that it will fit.Can I use the SystemImager tools to rebuild it and make it smaller?That’s what is next… 

Cluster pt 5. Next steps & challenges…

Published at December 8, 2007 in TechnoGeek. 0 Comments

First off, I need to shake the hands of the support folks at DCC. They have been responsive, and helpful - even to a hobbyist.

I got Debian 4.0 (etch) installed, and started to configure it to use the DCC packages, things were not going as smoothly as they could have. I emailed support at DCC, and the next day had some decent email from the support folks there. Apparently DCC is meant to run on Debian 3.1 (sarge). Continue reading ‘Cluster pt 5. Next steps & challenges…’

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