[mythtv-users] Hardware recommended?

[Michael T. Dean]

Kirby Bakken wrote:

> I have a 'BIOSTAR TForce6100-939' MB and an HD5000 HD capture card.  
> The on-board video does not currently work with any Nvidia driver 
> version.  I'm told that one of the 'next' available drivers will 
> work.  However, I have an Nvidia 5200 PCIExpres x16 card, and this 
> card is NOT fast enough to display HD video, so I doubt if the 
> on-board video would either (once Nvidia ships a driver that'll 
> work).  I'm going to have a Nvidia 5600GT card to try in a few 
> hours...  hopefully that'll work.

HD decoding performance should be unaffected by the video card type.  If 
using XvMC for decoding (which implies that the driver/hardware support 
an XvMCSurface large enough for your HDTV image), you'll get the same 
XvMC acceleration from any* XvMC-capable card.  The bottleneck here is 
likely your CPU.

Mike

*OK, it is possible for hardware to perform only motion-compensation 
support and require software iDCT, but I seriously doubt that any 
supported NVIDIA card doesn't do iDCT.  If so, it's likely that only 
previous-generation cards would be lacking iDCT, so if one 5xxx card 
does iDCT, they all should.