[mythtv] CUDA Code for nvidia cards

Daniel Kristjansson danielk at cuymedia.net
Tue Oct 28 21:07:44 UTC 2008


On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 16:41 -0400, R. G. Newbury wrote:
> I've just been reading a paean of praise in Linux Journal for the CUDA 
> code which apparently is the neatest thing since sliced bread, and grows 
>   hair on your *head* (since most of us are old enough to consider hair 
> -there- as a ...waste). Apparently, CUDA unleashes the power of the GPU 
> to speed up video/ray tracing/modelling etc. etc.
> 
> I assume, since the article does not explain, that this involves writing 
>   code in a particular manner that it is diverted from the CPU to the 
> GPU for calculation purposes (and presumably returned pre-digested for 
> output).
> 
> Does anyone have any idea how this actually works, and any idea whether 
> CUDA style code could possibly be of any use in mythtv?

It's really nothing new, I wrote some fancy rendering code using that
stuff in the late 1990's, but of course back then it only worked on
5xxx nVidia cards and the pseudo C often failed and had to be replaced
with asm. The problem is not that the hardware and drivers aren't there
to do the decoding, it's that no one has the both the motivation and
time to sit down and write a GPL mpeg-4 avc decoder that runs on the
GPU. It is not a small project, and you don't see much performance
payback until you've completed almost the entire task.

-- Daniel



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