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

[Andy Wettstein]

On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 02:00:58PM -0800, Justin The Cynical wrote:
> Michael T. Dean wrote:
> 
> > So, how does that hand taste?  You know, the one that feeds you (NVIDIA 
> > drivers)?
> 
> Are you referring to the ones from NVidia, or the ones from XOrg?
> 
> I have a 8400 CPU in my machine.  I don't have to use the NVidia driver 
> if I don't want to.  I'm running the binary from NVidia only for the 
> OpenGL functions used by MythMusic visulations.
> 
> 
> > Just be happy with the fact that they did anything for us.  Besides, 
> > have you looked at the prices of the cards on the list of supported 
> > GPU's?  We're talking $20 to $30--not to mention the fact that /many/ of 
> > the integrated GPU's are supported, too.
> 
> I am glad NVidia finally bought this functionality to Linux.  However, 
> that doesn't stop me from pointing out that it's something that by their 
> own marketing material is supported by their older chipsets.
> 
> The reason for the limited chipset support may very well be due to the 
> design of the newer chipsets with their unified shader pool and actually 
> designing the hardware with video decoding in mind, vs having a 2nd 
> software stack with decoding API's to somewhat fake it on older hardware.
> 
> If this is the case, then it should be stated and not simply ignored. 
> Otherwise it would appear that this is purely market-droid driven and 
> done to try and steal back some of the thunder that Intel and AMD/ATI 
> have regarding video decoding/acceleration support.

You can usually get somewhat official statements from nvidia here:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=14

Here is the thread talking about purevideo 1 (i.e. 6/7 and original 8800
cards) hardware:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=123098

I believe most of the actual hardware video capabilities of the 6/7 
cards is exposed through XVMC (not that there aren't issues with XVMC
that could be fixed, though).