[mythtv-users] ATI AVIVO

[Brian Wood]

On Jul 2, 2006, at 6:13 AM, Michael T. Dean wrote:

> On 07/02/2006 02:21 AM, Mike Choy wrote:
>
>> Ivan Kowalenko wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On Jun 30, 2006, at 18.23, Mike Choy wrote:
>>>
>>>>> Have enabled ATI AVIVO Support on my laptop , seems to work, has
>>>>> anyone
>>>>> else got any experience, say vs XvMC.
>>>>>
>>> Uhh, I'm not totally sure it's going to work. AVIVO (http://
>>> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVIVO) seems to be purely software. Not sure
>>> there's any Linux support on that. Even if it is, I doubt you're
>>> going to see any improvement versus XvMC. The purpose of XvMC is to
>>> offload some of the MPEG-2 decoding to the GPU.
>>>
>>> AVIVO doesn't have a thing to do with the GPU, but relies  
>>> entirely on
>>> the CPU for work. High-Def MPEG-2 is straining enough to the CPU, so
>>> I doubt you're going to see ANY improvement. Besides, AVIVO does
>>> ENcoding. XvMC does DEcoding.
>>>
>> Sadly Wiki pedia is out of date.
>> Avivo provides accelerated Video playback using the 3DGPU, for any
>> application that uses XV and xorg 6.9 and above (standard in SUSE  
>> 10.1),
>> which gives it huge compatability vs XvMC.
>>
>> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=442&num=12
>>
>
> But also means--in that mode--it's only doing the same acceleration  
> that
> Xv does, but doing it with 3D hardware instead of 2D hardware.
> Therefore, AVIVO does not decode the stream or any part of it--it  
> simply
> accelerates moving the image to the display once the CPU decodes it.
> Basically, it's a marketing thing to say it's there.

Precisely, Intel seems to let their marketing department develop  
"technology". Like the "Centrino Technology", which simply meant that  
you had bought the CPU, core logic and Wi-Fi radio from Intel. It had  
nothing to do with "technology" whatsoever, just marketing.