I've been upgrading the MythTV server in the basement. I still have the Hauppuage card, so NTSC works fine. But, its time to have some HDTV... I have to prepare for the transition.

I purchased a pcHDTV 5500. It was plug and play to get it work, I did upgrade the MythTV Software to Mythdora 5, as well. Everything went very smoothly.

I am now a month into recording, and testing. I love being able to encode HD. the image is beautiful. Playback however is somewhat troublesome. It's Apple's fault... Here's why.

When I run Mythfrontend on my iBook G4, I get really crappy playback, dropped frames, choppy audio. It just doesn't work.

From my testing, transcoding the video to 1024 pixels wide, and 2.2Mb/s seems to do the trick. I can try different sampling rates, but this works just fine.

When i play an HD stream on my laptop, I get cpu utilization of 100%. So the machine's processor is doing all the heavy lifting. What kind of video card is in an iBook? A Radeo Mobility 9200, of course. It turns out that this card has a built in MPEG2 decoder. This means that the machine is perfectly capable of HD playback.

Now the question becomes - what do I do to enable the use of that hardware?

in Mythfrontend, I chose MacAccellerated, and quartz-opengl for the video playback drivers. The way I understand it, this should enable the graphics hardware to playback the MPEG2 stream.

Tiger uses a Cocoa component called CoreImage to manage the display. So, is CoreImage being used on this machine, and with this card?

So, I fired up System Profiler, and clicked on Graphics/Displays - here's what i got:

Chipset Model:    ATY,RV280M9+
Type:    Display
Bus:    AGP
VRAM (Total):    32 MB
Vendor:    ATI (0x1002)
Device ID:    0x5c63
Revision ID:    0x0001
ROM Revision:    113-xxxxx-142
Displays:
Color LCD:
Display Type:    LCD
Resolution:    1024 x 768
Depth:    32-bit Color
Built-In:    Yes
Core Image:    Not Supported
Main Display:    Yes
Mirror:    Off
Online:    Yes
Quartz Extreme:    Supported

Notice the report says Core Image is Not Supported. Bummer. This means I have no way of taking adavantage of the MPEG decoder in the card. That is, unless there's something I dont know. I've looked around a little, and it seems like access to that component is not allowed.

Why would Apple NOT provide complete access to the card's internals? It would make this completely serviceable machine USABLE, no?