Was tipped off about this fantastic article from a recent Ubuntu Uk Podcast. The hardware looks pretty interesting an could make a great HD frontend for MythTV with VDPAU enabled. There’s a good post about trying VDPAU in MythBuntu on the forums but I haven’t had a chance to try it yet as I don’t have one of the supported GPUs.
Anyway, just thought the article was so good it was worth pointing out for anyone that might be looking for a cheap, near silent HD frontend.
This one drove me nuts for a while, watching 720p content over 54Mbit/s wi-fi should work fine but with the “out of the box” settings HD moves were stuttering terribly for me.
As an additional niggle, embedded subtitles were appearing but they were enormous.
By default MythTV uses mplayer for mkv, avi and mpeg files. To resolve the stutter and subtitle issue open the MythTV frontend and go to “Utilities / Setup” -> “Setup” -> “Media Settings” -> “Video Settings” -> “Player Settings” and set the “Default Video Player” to:
mplayer -fs -zoom -quiet -vo xv -subfont-text-scale 3 -cache 8912 -cache-min 4 -lavdopts threads=2:fast:skiploopfilter=all -sws 0 %s
You may find it easier to connect to the mythconverg database and set the VideoDefaultPlayer to the value above for the host machine on wireless.