Basic CrystalHD Question
#1
I don't have an ATV, but I'm running XBMC on my 1.66GHz Core Duo Mac Mini. I've only very recently become aware of the CrystalHD card. My video content is almost exclusively straight DVD rips (no extra compression or conversion). My biggest gripe with my current setup is that playing DVD images with XBMC taxes the Mini's CPU to the point that the case fan is always running at full blast.

Here's my question: Would the CrystalHD board be pressed into action playing plain old DVD VIDEO_TS stuff? And would this offload enough cycles from the CPU to slow down the fan? Huh
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#2
jonheal Wrote:I don't have an ATV, but I'm running XBMC on my 1.66GHz Core Duo Mac Mini. I've only very recently become aware of the CrystalHD card. My video content is almost exclusively straight DVD rips (no extra compression or conversion). My biggest gripe with my current setup is that playing DVD images with XBMC taxes the Mini's CPU to the point that the case fan is always running at full blast.

Here's my question: Would the CrystalHD board be pressed into action playing plain old DVD VIDEO_TS stuff? And would this offload enough cycles from the CPU to slow down the fan? Huh

No, SD video is being vectored to libmpeg2 for DVDs and ffmepg for everything else. If the AppleTV can handle it, the MacMini should have no problem either.

I bet you have postprocessing turned on which does software upscaling. Either that or you are running software renderer. I see no such behavior with DVD playback on my 1.6GHz CoreDuo MacMini. Rather than guess as the crystal ball is broke, posting XBMC.log to http://www.pastebin.com would help in debugging this.
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#3
davilla Wrote:No, SD video is being vectored to libmpeg2 for DVDs and ffmepg for everything else. If the AppleTV can handle it, the MacMini should have no problem either.

I bet you have postprocessing turned on which does software upscaling. Either that or you are running software renderer. I see no such behavior with DVD playback on my 1.6GHz CoreDuo MacMini. Rather than guess as the crystal ball is broke, posting XBMC.log to http://www.pastebin.com would help in debugging this.

I appear to not have Post-processing enabled. Rendering is set to Auto-select. Here's the PasteBin of the XBMC.log (startup through playing a bit of a DVD).
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#4
jonheal Wrote:I appear to not have Post-processing enabled. Rendering is set to Auto-select. Here's the PasteBin of the XBMC.log (startup through playing a bit of a DVD).

Check, no post processing and renderer is using ARB. What does 'top -o cpu' show when playing a DVD ?
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#5
davilla Wrote:Check, no post processing and renderer is using ARB. What does 'top -o cpu' show when playing a DVD ?

XBMC is using about 25-33% of the CPU(s). I've got a few other things running, too, but not much. Is 25-33% normal? To be honest, I don't know if the fan is running at top speed, but it's definitely audible. Here's the output from top. (I guess I could turn off XP while I'm watching movies. That'd save a few cycles.)
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#6
jonheal Wrote:XBMC is using about 25-33% of the CPU(s). I've got a few other things running, too, but not much. Is 25-33% normal? To be honest, I don't know if the fan is running at top speed, but it's definitely audible. Here's the output from top. (I guess I could turn off XP while I'm watching movies. That'd save a few cycles.)

Looks pretty normal. 68.16% idle, not much going on. You can drop this a bit more by doing local SMB mounts under OSX rather than accessing SMB using XBMC built-in client.
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#7
Maybe I'll just relax. Anyway, I like the fact that the SMB client in XBMC keeps the desktop free of shared drive litter.
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Basic CrystalHD Question0