[mythtv-users] 720p decoding

[Jesse Burt]

On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 10:41 +0100, Henrik Beckman wrote:
> It´s h.264 not mpeg2, not my best day today...
> 
> On Jan 16, 2008 9:15 AM, Henrik Beckman <henrik.list at gmail.com> wrote:
>         Hi,
>         
>         I´ve had USB issues with my A8N-VM CSM, my nova-TD hangs the
>         entire usb subsystem if i don´t occupy my second PCI slot with
>         an usb controller.
>         So I swapped my A64 3200 out for a 2,6Ghz P4, wich gave me 3!
>         usable pci slots =) 
>         
>         Unfortunatly I found out yesterday that ther are some shows
>         that I like that has aired on HDTV, can a 2.6Ghz P4 with HT
>         decode 720p, mpeg2?
>         I have an ATI 7000Ve card but might be able to swap to an
>         nvidia 6200 card, otherwise does the AMD rig have the oumph to
>         handle it? 
>         
>         TIA
>         /Henrik

Henrik,

My laptop has a Turion64 @ 2.2GHz (should have virtually identical
horsepower to your Athlon64 3200+) with a crappy Radeon XPress 200M, and
it does fairly well with 720p h.264 (I'm trying the HD videos off
apple.com's site...the 720p videos that are *actually* 720p and not 548p
or something else silly :). It plays back smoothly, with anywhere from
50-75% cpu usage using Xv in mplayer. I would choose the nVidia card if
it's not much trouble. I'm not certain but I don't believe there's
support for hardware acceleration of h.264 (at least in the Linux
driver) but it would most likely be a better experience than with the
ATI card. I don't have personal experience with a P4, but I can only
guess that it would be close, perhaps slightly better.

Cheers,
Jesse Burt