[elrepo] Intel video on CentOS 6.4 - SOLVED!

[Matt Garman]

On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 3:40 PM, Andrey Zhunev <a-j at a-j.ru> wrote:

> Matt,
> I just watched one movie via VAAPI so far. I didn't see any X lock ups,
> it seem to work quite good.
> I'll leave Myth on Live TV for a night - just to check over a longer
> period, and will post back, if you're interested.
>
>

Yes, I'm *very* interested!  At the risk of sounding patronizing, are you
sure you're actually using VAAPI within MythTV?  At least my version of
Myth (0.25.3 from ATrpms) doesn't provide a native vaapi playback profile;
I had to manually create one.

Do you have any high bitrate Bluray video to test on?  That was my main
driver in wanting vaapi: to be able to get smooth, high-bitrate video
playback without having to resort to a highly-clocked CPU and then deal
with all the heat and noise (or worse, have an add-in nVidia card like you
used to).

Based on this[1] post, I learned that not all Bluray discs are created
equal, and in fact some will really tax your system.  So I went out and
bought Transformers 2, because that post made it sound like the perfect
benchmark.  That post is getting on four years old, but apparently better
CPUs of that vintage can't smoothly do software rendering for that movie.
 Fortunately my i3-2100 can.  However, I can still see a huge difference in
CPU utilization with that movie with vaapi (<20%) versus no-vaapi (>80%).

But my i3-2100 is still a 3.1 GHz part, and 65 Watts TDP, and wasn't the
cheapest at the time I bought it.  If I thought vaapi would work reliably,
I could get away with lower-TDP parts that are cheaper.  I actually need to
build a second system.

Are you using any xorg.conf file?  Here's mine:

#Section "Device"
#   Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
#   Driver      "intel"
#   Option      "AccelMethod"  "sna"
#   Option      "AccelMethod"  "uxa"
#EndSection

As you can see, it's all comments, so I effectively have no xorg.conf file.
 But it reminds me that at the time I was trying out both AccelMethods.
 Curious if you've tweaked your xorg.conf at all?

If you pass the 48 hour mark without any lockups or weirdness, I'd be
really interested to know the specifics of your setup: hardware (CPU &
motherboard), kernel version (and any non-default kernel parameters),
MythTV version, and versions of all the relevant video related packages
(xorg-intel driver, libvaapi, mesa, etc).

[1] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/409627


Thanks!
Matt
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