gentoo and xbmc vs. openelec

Message

emc · Post by **emc** » Fri Nov 02, 2012 1:24 pm

Hi,
I plan but some htpc maybe Zotac Nano XS AD11 (AMD E450). I thinking of install Openelec but since I'm gentoo user why not try it with xbmc. Do you have any performance opinion which can be faster more responsive vs. easy to install?

Openelec should working out of box, but gentto gives me wide range of custmization and tuning for platform.

Any thoughts?

emc · Post by **emc** » Mon Nov 05, 2012 11:58 am

schorsch_76 · Post by **schorsch_76** » Mon Nov 05, 2012 12:12 pm

I own a E350 and it runs with VDR on gentoo. It gives you more options than for e.g. openelec but my setopbox should always run wothout a problem, so i dont upgrade it. I could even use openelec. It depends on your needs. If you are not experienced, i would recommend fpr you openelec. Its ready configured.

My E350 is really sleeping in full hd, only 20-25% CPU usage. All with open drivers xineliboutput and radeon and no fglrx.

emc · Post by **emc** » Mon Nov 05, 2012 2:13 pm

thx... I will try gentoo to configure (more fun) and if I got some troble I will give a try openelec

musv · Post by **musv** » Mon Nov 05, 2012 4:15 pm

I'm using XBMC (PVR) on a Atom (D525) ION2 machine running Gentoo.

Other things installed are:

mysql for XBMC
VDR as TV backend for XBMC
MPD to listen music without the TV enabled.

I'm using that combination for more than a year now. There are no noticeable performance issues. But it was quite a hard work to get it working and it doesn't work perfectly until today.

Problems:

The pvr repository changed from opdenkamp to Pulse Eight. Had to modify the git settings for the xbmc-9999 ebuild. -> got it working
VDR comes with a interface vdr-xvdr. For XBMC you need xbmc-addon xvdr as client module, which unfortunately crashes XBMC right after the start.
The former interface was the vnsi-server. This works out of the box in XBMC but is unmaintained in the vdr part. Means: There's no working ebuild vor vdr-vnsiserver anymore. I build it manually from the xmbc sources, which is not really nice.
To shutdown the HTPC, you need Polkit/Consolekit. If you start XBMC directly via inittab, consolekit doesn't recognize this session as active. A few months ago I was able to shutdown the HTPC via XBMC through Polkit anyway. After one of the last updates it stopped working, independent of the polkit-rule. So when I try to shutdown the PC, XBMC and Xorg quit and show the console. That f**cking polkit mess doesn't show me even an error message. In the most tutorials they try to avoid that problem via installing a login manager, e.g. lightdm. My hope is, that systemd replaces consolekit and can fix this mess somehow. (Is it crazy to hope on Poetterings stuff?)
When I want to watch a movie in FullHD and 24p, I have to reboot the HTPC sometimes. If not, the movie is flickering. Haven't figured out yet, what the problem is or where to search.

If you don't feel bothered with that problems, you'll get a really nice toy.

HolgerB · Post by **HolgerB** » Tue Nov 06, 2012 8:24 pm

emc wrote:Hi,
I plan but some htpc maybe Zotac Nano XS AD11 (AMD E450). I thinking of install Openelec but since I'm gentoo user why not try it with xbmc. Do you have any performance opinion which can be faster more responsive vs. easy to install?

Openelec should working out of box, but gentto gives me wide range of custmization and tuning for platform.

Any thoughts?

I doubt that Gentoo plus XBMC will behave any faster / more responsive than OpenELEC does.
Biggest benefit of OpenELEC:
You download the package matching your architecture, generate an install USB stick and you are ready to go.
It took me about 10 minutes to get my HTPC running with OpenELEC plus TVHeadEnd. One please shows me the same thing doing with Gentoo or any other generic Linux distribution out there.

On the other hand depending on your setup (e.g. multiple recording devices for DVB-T/DVB-S) you might run into lack of support in OpenELEC.

My Yakumo DVB-T stick worked like a charm out of the box.

HolgerB · Post by **HolgerB** » Wed Nov 07, 2012 2:42 pm

schorsch_76 wrote:My E350 is really sleeping in full hd, only 20-25% CPU usage. All with open drivers xineliboutput and radeon and no fglrx.

This one got me interested....

The last time I tried HD acceleration with my E350 and radeon it was plainly non-existent.
When you say HD are we talking about full HD 1080p encoded in h264 with all glory ?
If yes, what version of radeon are you running and is vaapi-support working now ?

TIA,
Holger

schorsch_76 · Post by **schorsch_76** » Fri Nov 09, 2012 8:36 am

... if i watch TV via my Tevii S470 card.

I will put a 1080p movie on it and watch it and the cpu usage. I will report back

HolgerB · Post by **HolgerB** » Fri Nov 09, 2012 10:14 am

schorsch_76,

That would be cool...also please include details on the radeon version you installed and how your xinellioutput is configured.

I am aware that xineliboutput is an output driver which allows to use plain framebuffer devices for video playback. I am also aware that you can choose radeon or vdpau as module but do not understand how this interfaces with GPU-based playback of AMD based devices which usually sport VAAPI interfaces.

HD playback is quite important to me. Free software is important as well. So if there would be an option to use the APU with free drivers (radeon) instead of the GeForce 9500GT I curently use, and get stress-free 1080p h264 stuff, I would be happy to hear...

schorsch_76 · Post by **schorsch_76** » Fri Nov 09, 2012 1:05 pm

If i play tears of steel [1] [2] i got the following situation. CPU Usage about 60% . The load average is about 1.2 which estimates to 60% with 2 cores.

http://s1.directupload.net/file/d/3069/2dxz2e3a_png.htm

xineliboutput configuration: http://bpaste.net/show/56870/
vdr packages: http://bpaste.net/show/56871/
loaded modules http://bpaste.net/show/56874/
xorg.conf : http://bpaste.net/show/56875/
CPUInfo: http://bpaste.net/show/56876/

I'm using the =media-plugins/vdr-xineliboutput-9999 . cvs status: http://bpaste.net/show/56873/

My kernel is 3.5.4.
x11-base/xorg-server-1.12.2
x11-base/xorg-drivers-1.12

I connected my tv via HDMI. Audio too. There you need the kernel parameter radeon.audio=1

What else do you need to know?

Bye
schorsch

[1] http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/blend ... _1080p.mov
[2] http://mango.blender.org/production/tea ... oad-watch/

HolgerB · Post by **HolgerB** » Fri Nov 09, 2012 4:43 pm

Thanks a lot for your detailed informations. IMO Tears of Steel is not really representative for 1080p stuff.

While it is h264-encoded and has a width of 1920, it only has a height of 800 pix which requires a lot less CPU power than a full 1080p movie does.

I am still unshure how this stuff plays together.

Radeon seems to provide no video acceleration at all. When you have fglrx installed (which you do not seem to have), then XvMC is available. There is a wrapper from VAAPI to XVMC which would enable one to use xine-lib with VAAPI support.

I am not shure how all this mixes with the radeon part.

According to the feature matrix for radeon then video acceleration is either non-existent or WIP:
http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

Have a nice weekend,
Holger

emc · Post by **emc** » Fri Nov 09, 2012 5:25 pm

Since I didn't buy it my HTPC, so maybe you can suggest some platform for XBMC (and good opensource support for HD, VAAPI etc). AMD (E450, E30..), Intel Atom (D525...) or maybe VIA.... ATI/AMD or NVIDIA???

bye

musv · Post by **musv** » Fri Nov 09, 2012 7:09 pm

My HTPC is running on a Zotac IONITX U-E motherboard.

Spec:

Atom D525 with a GT 218 Nvidia onboard graphics chip
4 GB memory DDR3 800 Mhz
Wlan N, Optical S/PDIF and HDMI output
90 Watts power brick included in the package

Every Video stuff is running smoothly. Doesn't matter which size. In TV mode (50 Hz, 1080i) CPU last with XBMC and VDR is totally about 6%. Used graphics driver is nvidia-drivers with vdpau acceleration. 24p stuff works too without problems.

In XBMC and other forums the guys love the AMD LLano. But I still have my doubts. Maybe it's running better with Windows. Except of the flickering problem (see above) I'm really contend with the ION Atom combination.

HolgerB · Post by **HolgerB** » Mon Nov 12, 2012 8:38 am

I would like to second the observation of musv.
I have an Liano system myself for daily use and after some experiments with fglrx and the integrated GPU, I switched to an external GPU (NVidia 9500GT). You should either consider buying an ION platform-based system (Intel Atom plus NVidia GPU) or use an Liano-based motherboard with a PCIe slot. There are plenty of cheap NVidia-based graphic adapter which provide sufficient HD acceleration (e.g. 8400, 9X00, 210GT) without the need for active cooling.

gentoo and xbmc vs. openelec

gentoo and xbmc vs. openelec

Re: gentoo and xbmc vs. openelec