[ant_thomas]

As a little update on de-interlacing/scaling, I've been testing out my MSI J1900i motherboard with hardware acceleration disabled.

This gives much better de-interlacing, which is fine for my requirements.

I only need it for watching SD TV (UK 576i based material), which the processor handles easily.

I'm using TVHeadend to stream freeview to XBMC.

This also appears to still be able to cope with full 1080p Blu-Ray rips.

1 of the cores will hover around the 80% mark when doing this (with the others hanging around 10-20%).

I don't know about anyone else, but this seems ideal for me?

Got to agree with your findings

I'm using an Asus EeeBox EB1037 which is an Intel J1900 with nvidia 820m.
The nvidia 820m graphics aren't currently working in Linux so I'm relying on the Intel J1900.

Running OpenELEC 4.0.7 with everything in software mode.

Enable multi-threaded CPU decoding if you have the option (under expert options I think), that might change your 80% on 1 CPU issue.

My findings are that all in software with VAAPI turned off:

"Deinterlace" works great for SD Live TV content.

"Deinterlace (half)" works better for HD Live TV content.
When it is set to "Deinterlace" there's some drops and stutters on 1080i content.

It can only really cope with Bilinear scaling.

(this is all at 1080p compared to your 720p)