[mythtv-users] FYI - New HW video accellAPI from NVIDIA

Justin The Cynical cynical at penguinness.org
Sun Nov 16 22:00:58 UTC 2008


Michael T. Dean wrote:

> So, how does that hand taste?  You know, the one that feeds you (NVIDIA 
> drivers)?

Are you referring to the ones from NVidia, or the ones from XOrg?

I have a 8400 CPU in my machine.  I don't have to use the NVidia driver 
if I don't want to.  I'm running the binary from NVidia only for the 
OpenGL functions used by MythMusic visulations.


> Just be happy with the fact that they did anything for us.  Besides, 
> have you looked at the prices of the cards on the list of supported 
> GPU's?  We're talking $20 to $30--not to mention the fact that /many/ of 
> the integrated GPU's are supported, too.

I am glad NVidia finally bought this functionality to Linux.  However, 
that doesn't stop me from pointing out that it's something that by their 
own marketing material is supported by their older chipsets.

The reason for the limited chipset support may very well be due to the 
design of the newer chipsets with their unified shader pool and actually 
designing the hardware with video decoding in mind, vs having a 2nd 
software stack with decoding API's to somewhat fake it on older hardware.

If this is the case, then it should be stated and not simply ignored. 
Otherwise it would appear that this is purely market-droid driven and 
done to try and steal back some of the thunder that Intel and AMD/ATI 
have regarding video decoding/acceleration support.


> Oh, and there's also the whole, you really don't /need/ GPU-assisted 
> decode, anyway.  My system happily handles US MPEG-2 HDTV.  If you're 
> using an HD-PVR to record HDTV to MPEG-4 AVC from (rented) 
> cable/satellite STB's (with a monthly cable bill), the extra $20 to $30 
> you spend to get a supported card is really a negligible part of your TV 
> cost, but you can always buy a system that can play that back even 
> without the GPU assist (and the support for HD-PVR output is getting 
> better every day).

Cost of the cards isn't the point.  The point is that their older chips 
support the functions that this new driver has.  I'm not going to simply 
roll over and accept whatever is handed to me by a company that has 
refused to provide programming specs for their hardware[1] which would 
allow the same functionality that has been available on other platforms 
to be implemented on my OS of choice.

If I was going to just accept whatever is provided to me and not 
complain about it's shortcomings, then I'd still be running Microsoft 
software on everything with it's support of non-mandatory broadcast 
flags that limit what I can and can't do with the video stream that are 
sent over the airwaves.

[1] Never mind that their largest competitor has started releasing this
     info.


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