[mythtv] vid branch hardware Q

[Steven Adeff]

I'm building a mythtv setup for my parents new house remodel and part
of that will be a "master" frontend for their home theater room. I'm
trying to "future-proof" it as much as I can and seeing as how the vid
branch seems to be progressing quite well I assume it will be merged
soon and people will be using their GPU's to do decoding instead of
the CPU. My question is about how this works exactly? ie, is it better
to spend money on a fanless 8800GTS or a fast CPU?  Can the vid branch
use both the CPU and GPU to decode, does it need to do this?

One thing I'd like to make sure is that it can play back
HD-DVD/Blu-Ray/h264 content (legality of playing back HD-DVD/Blu-Ray
via a deCSS type program aside). I know the coreAVC patch helps do
this, but I assume its not going to be able to use the GPU via the
-vid branch? Will the -vid branch need the coreAVC patch to play back
h264 content or will the GPU be able to handle it on its own?

Obviously one option is to get a decently fast CPU to handle what
MPEG2 broadcast content there is now and a good enough but cheap video
card and upgrade them in the future as needed and as price drops.
Would this make more sense?

thanks!

-- 
Steve
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