[mythtv-users] Just how great can VDPAU be?

[Mark Kendall]

2008/11/20 Yeechang Lee <ylee at pobox.com>:
> Am I mistaken? What am I missing, if anything?

OK - so I've been spending far too much time playing with VDPAU today
to resist responding :)

As I type I've got mythtv playing live tv using vdpau for playback.
Double rate temporal deinterlacer, standard def MPEG2 source, (mostly)
working osd, core2due 2.4gz, 8800GT and 1GB ram. Current utilisation
hovers at around 1-2%.

Switch to the 1080i/h264 channel (think high bitrate) - 1-2%.

Switch to an old BBC HD h264 recording (again 1080i/high bitrate) - load 1-2%.

No tearing, vertical sync seems to work 'out of the box' and
deinterlacing quality is reasonable (though the implementation is
simple and some further work could improve it).

The main downside at the moment is picture quality (and the same
issues apply to mplayer - so appear to be related to the state of the
api/driver):-

 - all my h264 streams break up intermittently. I think nvidia have
acknowledged that higher profile streams still have issues. Otherwise
quality is very good.
 - all my mpeg2 streams and recordings exhibit some form of vertical
'blockiness'. It varies by source and I even see it on the nvidia
'reference' clips.

All told, a pretty impressive start from nvidia - but it needs work.

Regards

Mark