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

[Nicolas Will]

On Tue, 2008-02-12 at 19:54 +0000, Bruce Richardson wrote:
> > > But there is already a git branch of the intel driver with
> preliminary
> > > hardware acceleration.
> > 
> > Hmm.  How good is it?  My impression of Intel chipsets is that
> they  
> > were intended for business use, and didn't have much in the way of  
> > acceleration.  Is that an outdated assumption?
> 
> NVidia cards are better for games but the Intel chipsets have decent
> support for motion compensation and other features that are useful to
> MythTV.  If all you are using a box for is a media centre, then Intel
> offers good value, particularly if you are trying for a quiet, small
> form-factor machine.  I think the new Intel Mac Minis (or something
> custom-built to a similar spec) would be perfectly capable of handling
> HDTV, for example.
> 
> http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC

If your read the Intel part, you will see that the situation is not rosy
*now*.

XVMC is only supported on the i810 driver, and only on very old Intel
GPUs.

XVMC is supported in a weird branch of git on the intel driver, and with
GPU limitations too.

In any case, both drivers could only do stuff around MPEG2, not H.264,
and not the best stuff either

i810 is an old driver not seeing development anymore.
intel is the new driver, used to be called the modsetting branch. It is
seeing active development, with great guys involved. Until the docs
release, only a few people had access to the proper information for
advance functionality. This situation has now changed.

Not great now, will certainly be great quickly.

And yes, H.264 has pretty nifty algorithms involved.

Nico