Okay, well I’ve decided to try something completely new and different — I’m going to do a lot of research, read up on all the relevant subjects, and then use my mad consumer skillz and make some planned purchases. How freaking boring.
I’ve pretty much already come to the conclusion that nothing short of a slightly beefy computer is going to cut it as a usable mythfrontend. I’m highly skeptical (hence the research part), but I think that a 1ghz mini-itx system might be able to pull it off. Apparently, there are motherboards that have onboard MPEG2 hardware decoding, taking a huge load off of the CPU on playback. I’m pretty skeptical about how easy it is to get those working too, but I’m willing to consider it.
One thing I know that would be a shoo-in replacement is using a Hauppauge PVR 350 which does both hardware MPEG2 encoding and decoding. I know right now you can use it’s S-Video out connection to watch the TV, though I kind of remember reading something about that disappearing soon or X not using it anymore or something. Gah, I really need to read up.
X does not support the pvr350 tv-out out of the box except for unaccelerated frambuffer. To get xv working you would need the xdriver driver from ivtv.
Mythtv can either use the tv-out or display mpeg via X (using xv). There is unfortunately only one caviat, when mythtv uses the pvr350 tv-out it will also send tje audio over there. So if you have hooked up a speakerset this will not work and instead the sound would come from the tv.
Also the tv-out from the pvr350 only accepts mpeg. So if you transcode to mpeg4 you are out of luck for now. But there is hope as in mplayer svn the pvr:// output has been resurrected. It is not finnished yet but when it is it will allow you to play mpeg4 with mplayer on the pvr350’s tv-out/decoder. Mpeg1 and 2 should already be working.
the ivtv project is currently in the process of getting in mainline and hopefully will be there in 2.6.19/20.
LinKs:
http://ivtvdriver.org/
http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Howto:XDriver
http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Documentation