2014-02-05, 01:16
Thanks to all the developers for making this work! TV content now looks fantastic on my Haswell i5 NUC.
Just a quick note on something I did wrong along the way in case anyone else runs into the same issues. I followed the Howto (with the exception of starting directly into xbmc), but I still had screen tearing that was much worse than before I switched to this vaapi branch. My mistake: I'm running Xubuntu 13.10, and I was booting into xfce and running xbmc on top of that (I need a desktop environment for other things). The fix: I installed fluxbox instead, and everything runs perfectly now.
Fluxbox is right there in the howto; I just ignored it thinking xfce and xfwm were lightweight enough to work as substitutes. They're not. If you're running xbmc in ubuntu on top of gnome or kde or xfce and having video issues, give fluxbox a shot! It takes two minutes to apt-get fluxbox, logout, and log back in with fluxbox. (You'll also get lower cpu usage. I thought xfce was light, but with vaapi and yadif on 1080i source I dropped from 4-core cpu usage of 175 down to 120 with fluxbox.)
Just a quick note on something I did wrong along the way in case anyone else runs into the same issues. I followed the Howto (with the exception of starting directly into xbmc), but I still had screen tearing that was much worse than before I switched to this vaapi branch. My mistake: I'm running Xubuntu 13.10, and I was booting into xfce and running xbmc on top of that (I need a desktop environment for other things). The fix: I installed fluxbox instead, and everything runs perfectly now.
Fluxbox is right there in the howto; I just ignored it thinking xfce and xfwm were lightweight enough to work as substitutes. They're not. If you're running xbmc in ubuntu on top of gnome or kde or xfce and having video issues, give fluxbox a shot! It takes two minutes to apt-get fluxbox, logout, and log back in with fluxbox. (You'll also get lower cpu usage. I thought xfce was light, but with vaapi and yadif on 1080i source I dropped from 4-core cpu usage of 175 down to 120 with fluxbox.)
