[mythtv-users] A paradigm shift is coming. Are you ready?

[Brian Phillips]

jedi at mishnet.org wrote:
> ...well. MythTV h264 seems to be crappy in general. Even new and
> powerful systems are affected by this. Hopefully the new Hauppauge
> device will help get those issues sorted out.  
> 
>    As things stand right now, I happily use an external player for
> all of my h264 content. Given the features I've cobbled together for
> myself, that will likely not change. Although I do hope that MythTV
> can exploit the HD PVR in a timely fashion. Realtime h264 transcoding
> would be just too cool. It doesn't even have to be HD.    

Which brings me to something that's ruffling my feathers recently, the lack
of sufficient hardware to do all this decoding/transcoding.

We have a sufficient platter of encoders/tuner boards.  These provide
invaluable services to people like me with a  P3-550 so I can watch standard
definition.

But tax time is here, refunds are on their way, and I am looking at moving
to HD.  I have my display, tuner/encoder, and system all set up except for
one thing, the mode of outputting these MPEG2/MPEG4 streams to my
television.  It seems that any nvidia after the 6 series (or earlier) will
do, as long as you have a sufficiently good processor.  My question is, why
do we need to purchase an $80+ processor to handle this stuff?  Why can't we
get some hardware to do this decoding for us?  XvMC is offered as a way of
unloading _part_ of the decoding onto a dedicated piece of hardware, but
looking here:
 http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC#Example_CPU_Savings and based on
my own experiences, it doesn't help _that_ much.  As well, I didn't go the
HD route and become a videophile so I could watch the OSD in black and
white.

I'm pretty new to this stuff, so if I've misspoken about the state of
things, please keep the flames low.  I've just been looking to make the
plunge into HD but don't want to buy a whole new system that will be bogged
down just decoding HD content for display.  Why don't we have more options
for dedicated hardware for MPEG2/MPEG4 decoding and even, transcoding?  Is
the hardware there in video cards, but non-supported in Linux?  I read
somewhere that directx was the method for using these GPUs to their fullest,
so is linux therefore locked out of these GPUs to a point?