[kenelbow]

From what I can tell, turning off MediaCodec is what eliminates the deinterlace option. I don't think libstagefright allows that option.

Here in Tucson, I only notice interlacing on the SD (non-HD) channels -- which I don't watch much of. But you're right, it's terribly annoying.

So turning off transcoding on my HDHR Plus and switching to libstagefright for acceleration have significantly improved live TV performance. Interlacing on 1080i broadcasts is only slightly noticeable for me. I'm sure it will pass the wife test. I would prefer to have working h.264 transcoding and hardware acceleration, but this is an acceptable work around, at least for now. Thanks.

There must be something about the h.264 implementation by Silicon Dust that XBMC on android doesn't like. Other h.264 content works fine, but LiveTV and recordings from this capture device just don't work very well. They are fine on Linux and Windows though. Worthy of a bug report maybe?

Now that I have a second verification, I'm going to try to post something over on Silicon Dust's forums -- to encourage those guys to start looking into it on their end too.

From an XBMC perspective, I'm still confused about why I see no appreciable CPU-activity difference between MPEG2 playback and any H.264 playback (I believe this is true for even non-Silicon Dust H.264 videos). I would expect to see much lighter CPU activity on the hardware decoded playback (H.264) vs software decoded (MPEG2).

I guess I should just be happy that MPEG2 plays back as well as it does on the AFTV, but maybe one of the decoding-gurus can chime in what one would expect to observe on hardware vs software decoding.

Also, it may be worth mentioning on the Wiki that MPEG2 playback of OTA signals seems to work just fine on the AFTV. I ended up buying a transcoding HDHR Plus only because of the ominous warning under the "Known Issues" section on the Wiki that says: "VC-1 and MPEG2 are not hardware decoded in XBMC on the Fire TV." What's the issue? it appears to playback just as well as H.264 videos.

I agree, CPU usage should be much lower for h.264 decoding since it is supposedly being performed by hardware codecs. Its very confusing to me.

I also bought my HDHR Plus specifically for h.264 transcoding out of concern that MPEG2 playback would be poorer on AFTV than it actually is. I already had an HDHR Plus (MPEG2 only) that was working fine. I'm still using it as my 3rd and 4th tuners in MythTV in fact. I would be interested to hear what you find out from Silicon Dust.