[mythtv-users] Nvidia CUDA / HD decoding

[Blammo]

On 2/19/07, Michael T. Dean <mtdean at thirdcontact.com> wrote:
> That's what XvMC is--MPEG-2 accel.  XvMC allows using the video card to
> do Motion Compensation (MC) and inverse Discrete Cosine Transform
> (iDCT)--which are required mathematical operations for decoding MPEG-2.
> It could also be implemented to accelerate MPEG-4 and some other
> CODEC's, but isn't worth the driver vendor's time in most
> cases--especially now that they've opened up much more ("unlimited")
> capability with GLSL (as unlimited as the hardware's programmable shader
> implementation, that is).

Mike, all, thank you for the info in this thread. Always an education..

However, if I understand it correctly:

1. Hardware accel for H.264/MPEG4 is available via OpenGL
2. Vendor must support it
3. SW Devs must drive/render to it. (not sure about this one)

Assuming the first two, how would it present itself in Myth? As an
alternate to XvMC? This might be a better question for the devs, but
how far away would something like that be?

Being able to drop the CPU requirements for playing back HD-level
content would blunt a bit one of the speedbumps for Myth/etc and wider
acceptability. And heck, it would save people like me sinking another
$400 into a frontend.. .:)