[mythtv] vid branch hardware Q

[Mark Kendall]

On 7/11/07, Steven Adeff <adeffs.mythtv at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm building a mythtv setup for my parents new house remodel and part
> of that will be a "master" frontend for their home theater room. I'm
> trying to "future-proof" it as much as I can and seeing as how the vid
> branch seems to be progressing quite well I assume it will be merged
> soon and people will be using their GPU's to do decoding instead of
> the CPU. My question is about how this works exactly? ie, is it better
> to spend money on a fanless 8800GTS or a fast CPU?  Can the vid branch
> use both the CPU and GPU to decode, does it need to do this?

Steve - the mythtv-vid branch has no new decoding functionality. The
only GPU assisted decoding is still XvMC. The opengl display method
only uses the GPU for colour space conversion, scaling and
deinterlacing.

If I were looking for a new card, I'd certainly be looking at the 8xxx
series cards but whereas you could make a reasonable stab at overall
performance comparisons for the 5 to 7 series cards based on number of
pipes etc, I still don't have a feel what is necessary in the 'new
world' of streams. Fanless 8500/8600 cards are readily available at
'reasonable' prices but I just don't know if they have the clout to
cope with 1080 at 60fps.

> One thing I'd like to make sure is that it can play back
> HD-DVD/Blu-Ray/h264 content (legality of playing back HD-DVD/Blu-Ray
> via a deCSS type program aside). I know the coreAVC patch helps do
> this, but I assume its not going to be able to use the GPU via the
> -vid branch? Will the -vid branch need the coreAVC patch to play back
> h264 content or will the GPU be able to handle it on its own?

No GPU help for h264 is likely in the foreseeable future. I understand
there is work in progress for multithreaded ffmped decoding, so this
will likely be the thing to focus on. Once multithread support is
available, any fairly recent multi-core cpu should do the trick.

Regards

Mark