[mythtv-users] Re: PVR-250 worth the upgrade?

[Joseph A. Caputo]

On Friday 03 October 2003 17:40, Jarod C. Wilson wrote:
> On Friday, Oct 3, 2003, at 14:01 US/Pacific, Will Dormann wrote:
> 
> > At 04:36 PM 10/3/2003 +0000, you wrote:
> >> The only hardware MPEG decoder boards I know of are the DXR3, PVR-350 
> >> and
> > the
> >> on-board decoder on the Via Epia M10K.  There are probably others, 
> >> but I'm
> >> pretty sure that none of the consumer video cards (i.e., GeForce, 
> >> etc) have
> >> hardware decoders.
> >>
> >> Perhaps you're getting this confused with the XvMC support for the 
> >> GeForce4
> >> MX?  This is an output enhancement only; it doesn't do any decoding.  
> >> My
> >> understanding is that it can help reduce with jitter in high-motion 
> >> scenes,
> >> or something along those lines.
> >
> >
> > I've heard that the Geforce4 MX cards have hardware MPEG2 decoding.  
> > Here,
> > for example:
> > http://www.hothardware.com/hh_files/S&V/nvgf4ti-gf4mx.shtml
> >
> > I'm not sure what the truth behind that is.   Or whether a Linux driver
> > would enable this MPEG2 decoder.
> > Anybody have some insight into this?
> 
> Well, according to nVidia themselves...
> 
> http://www.nvidia.com/page/pg_20020201403631.html
> 
> ...there's an integrated hardware mpeg2 decoder. Didn't know that until 
> now myself. Not sure exactly what the level of support for it is in the 
> current nvidia driver though. The only things mentioned explicitly are 
> support for XvMC's IDCT and motion-compensation acceleration.


Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle!  That's really cool... I really should hang 
out on the NVidia/Linux forum more often and see if there are any plans for 
their driver to support this in the future.  Of course, it being 
closed-source, we'd likely run into the same issues that we did with the CLE 
decoder.

-JAC