[mythtv-users] FYI - New HW video accellAPI from NVIDIA

Nicolas Will nico at youplala.net
Sun Nov 16 10:25:19 UTC 2008


On Sun, 2008-11-16 at 02:06 -0800, Justin The Cynical wrote:
> Steven Adeff wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 3:03 PM, Travis Tabbal <travis at tabbal.net> wrote:
> >> Considering the cost of the supported GPUs, it seems that the 3Ghz dual core
> >> CPUs are the way to go for now.
> >>
> >> Now, if it supported older mobo chipsets, like the 61xx series, it could be
> >> quite useful for many of us. I see no need to put a powerful and expensive
> >> graphics card in my frontend when the CPU can do it just fine for about a
> >> $40-$50 premium over the CPU I would need anyway.
> > 
> > those older chipsets just don't have the design to handle processing
> > that data, it's not a matter of driver support.
> 
> I have a problem with this idea.
> 
> According to the PDF on the Nvidia site[1][2], every PCIe chipset (and 
> some of the AGP ones as well) back to the GeForce Go 6600 is supported 
> by PureVideo, which includes "H.264 Decode Acceleration".
> 
> Looking further, the only major difference between the 6xxx and 7xxx+ 
> series is support for "MPEG-2 Inverse Telecine" for HD, which is only 
> supported for the 7600 GT and up.
> 
> If NVidia can get it[3] running under windows with older chipsets, I 
> don't see any reason for the Linux equivalent to be crippled in 
> comparison.  The only reason I can think of is they went for the newer 
> chipsets, which may have the larger share of the NVidia/Linux market, 
> never mind that the removed XVMC support from the 8XXX and up chipsets 
> under Linux (which is the main reason I was looking at NVidia cards when 
> building my current FE/BE).
> 
> IMO, if NVidia pulls their collective heads out and makes this new 
> driver API about the same as PureVideo when discussing chipset support, 
> this may do a lot about repairing their bruised reputation within many 
> FOSS circles.
> 
> [1] Which appears to be based on version 158.18 of the windows drivers
> [2] http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_support.html
> [3] It being H.264 Decode Acceleration and other such things

You are talking about PureVideo.

NVIDIA is really talking about PureVideo HD. It looks like the circuitry
on-chip is quite different, thus needs different code.

If the marketing names are about the same, it doesn't mean that the
engineering is.

Nico



More information about the mythtv-users mailing list