GeekForce

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?

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…’

Well, I did a google for ‘Debian Clustering’ and I found the link in the previous post to the Debian DCC package.

I downloaded that, and am installing it as we speak. In looking at the search results, I clicked the second link, and got to the beowulf.org site, which had an article about using DCC, which basically said that it was not as well rounded as something called ROCKS. Continue reading ‘Cluster pt 3. rocksclusters.org’

For many years I wanted to have a cluster. Mostly for the challenge of setting it up, but also to learn about what kinds of applications work best in a clustered environment.I started with a group of identical 486 boxes purchased from Laclede Computer Trading. These were adequate machines to learn to build with, but I quickly outstripped them, mostly because the OS’es dont support the old hardware they have. Continue reading ‘Cluster pt 1. Hardware’