[mythtv-users] GeForce 4 and MythTv Frontend

[Michael T. Dean]

J. Donavan Stanley wrote:

> aslong at uark.edu wrote:
>
>> My understanding of the GF4 is that it has no hardware decoder 
>> onboard.  Something like that is limited to the PVR350 (I'm sure 
>> there are other decoder only cards too).  I believe the GF4 does all 
>> mpeg decoding via software, which might be a bit choppy on your machine.
>
> The Geforce 4 line DO offer MPEG2 acceleration.  Most folks don't use 
> since they don't need it and there's no point in limiting what you can 
> do with the stream unless you have to.

Both right.  GF4 does not offer MPEG hardware /decoding/, but nearly all 
nVidia cards have MPEG /acceleration/ using XvMC and/or iDCT.

However, all nVidia NV4x and above cards will come with hardware 
MPEG1/2/4 encoding and decoding (see 
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_12687.html and 
http://www.nvidia.com/page/pg_20040406661996.html ).  Of course, if 
you're buying a GeForce 6800 or 6800 Ultra for a Myth box, you're 
wasting one heck of a nice ***dows game machine--especially since Myth 
doesn't (yet) support the on-board encoding/decoding...

Mike