ati/nvidia 3d driver quality and hdtv mpeg4 acceleration on agp cards

[chipsugar]

I'm after advice on whether it's possible to get HDTV decoding on an agp card via nvidias VDPAU. I have an ageing athlon xp I use as a media centre and to play a games from the last few years. I have it set up using gentoo to autoboot mythtv.

My current setup has an athlon xp mobile 2400 which can happily overclock to 2500Mhz (I usually underclock though to keep the cpu fan very quiet) and a silent geforce 6200. I have no intention of replacing my motherboard or cpu as I have other things I need to spend money on. However I'd like it receive the british hdtv channels, which are encoded as h264 with CABAC, and my card has an odd ghosting effect on the display which is quite noticable. I'm wondering if any agp cards exist that would accelerate decoding (e.g using nvidia's VDPAU or ati's UVD) or whether only pci-e cards do so? If it's only supported via dxva then please still mention it as I do dual boot to windows.

I'm also wondering how suitable ati cards are *at the moment*. Do they still have major problems? Please only answer if using the *latest* binary drivers or open source branches updates in the last 2 months for this as I know their drivers changed a lot recently.

[Aradreth]

I'm after advice on whether it's possible to get HDTV decoding on an agp card via nvidias VDPAU. I have an ageing athlon xp I use as a media centre and to play a games from the last few years. I have it set up using gentoo to autoboot mythtv.

My current setup has an athlon xp mobile 2400 which can happily overclock to 2500Mhz (I usually underclock though to keep the cpu fan very quiet) and a silent geforce 6200. I have no intention of replacing my motherboard or cpu as I have other things I need to spend money on. However I'd like it receive the british hdtv channels, which are encoded as h264 with CABAC, and my card has an odd ghosting effect on the display which is quite noticable. I'm wondering if any agp cards exist that would accelerate decoding (e.g using nvidia's VDPAU or ati's UVD) or whether only pci-e cards do so? If it's only supported via dxva then please still mention it as I do dual boot to windows.

I'm also wondering how suitable ati cards are *at the moment*. Do they still have major problems? Please only answer if using the *latest* binary drivers or open source branches updates in the last 2 months for this as I know their drivers changed a lot recently.

Your out of luck when it comes to VDPAU as only series 8 or higher support it and nvidia no longer do an AGP version. For UVD you are in luck as ATI does have AGP cards that have an AGP version. (HD 2400 Pro, HD 2600 XT/PRO, and some 3000 cards) As for if UVD is worth the bother and the state of the ATI drivers I haven't the slightest clue.

[Kano]

I would not call it luck that there are AGP cards with newer chips from ATI. In many cases you will not be lucky at all with Linux when you want to use em...

[Aradreth]

I would not call it luck that there are AGP cards with newer chips from ATI. In many cases you will not be lucky at all with Linux when you want to use em...

I've not used an ATI under linux in a long time so I don't really know but considering he also dual boots windows an ATI card could give him some hardware accelerated play back as I'm sure UVD works fine under windows. Now it's upto chipsugar to decided whether or not the windows benfits are worth the draw backs under linux.

[jdmpike]

Similar Experience....

I have a *very* similar setup and can identify with what you are going through...

I had been looking to upgrade my AGP video card in my HTPC for a while, and when AMD/ATI opensourced their driver, I wanted to support that effort. I ended up purchasing this - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814121260. It is a solid (and silent!) piece of hardware, unfortunately the drivers (catalyst, radeon, radeonhd) to take advantage of the mpeg-4 video acceleration part of it just aren't there at present time. I have spent a lot of time in #radeonhd annoying the smart people in there. From what they are saying, it looks like UVD support might make it into the open source radeonhd driver around April? Could AMD get this in the Catalyst driver before then?


In addition to my media center, I also have an PCI-E Nvidia 8400GS for my desktop. With the recent Nvidia driver (180.11), you get PureVideo-ish support if you patch Mplayer to take advantage of it. I am sure newer versions of other players will include hooks eventually.


I am eager to see how each plays out, but right now Nvidia has the lead when it comes to the Linux drivers.

[monraaf]

unfortunately the drivers (catalyst, radeon, radeonhd) to take advantage of the mpeg-4 video acceleration part of it just aren't there at present time. I have spent a lot of time in #radeonhd annoying the smart people in there. From what they are saying, it looks like UVD support might make it into the open source radeonhd driver around April? Could AMD get this in the Catalyst driver before then?

I think they already have Linux UVD support in Catalyst, or at least they are working on it.

If you do a:

objdump -CT /usr/lib/libAMDXvBA.so.1.0 |grep -i 'linux'

You'll see that there are some Linux specific classes related to UVD in the AMDXvBA library. Assuming that they didn't write that code just for fun I think it's more a matter of when they are going to release the API to their library.

[jdmpike]

I thought the UVD support that exists in the Catalyst driver is for MPEG-2 only (from what I have read recently on Phoronix - I am no expert...)??? I was wondering about mpeg-4 part 10 (x/h.264, avc). I have no doubt that they plan on releasing it, and probably soon. They are paying a lot more attention to the Linux community and Nvidia is sharp on their game, forcing AMD to deliver results on their cards quickly.

I used the proprietary driver briefly (the one in the Intrepid Ibex package - Catalyst 8.10). I stopped because it 1) underscan over HDMI for 1080p on my display, 2) offered no noticeable video playback acceleration for media on my HTPC and 3) video playback flicker unless I was using X11 output. Installing the radeonhd driver 1.2.4 from the git repository at least addressed my underscan. I eagerly await the day that UVD is supported in that driver and media player apps like Mplayer, ffmpeg, and VLC can leverage it.

In the end, I really don't care - I just want to be able to play 1080p content on my machine with out bringing my dual core proc to its knees. I will use whatever driver gets me there first.

[chipsugar]

Ok so it looks like the ati hd2400 might be worthwhile in 4 months time *if* the binary driver becomes more wine friendly or the opensource drivers get uvd sorted (and become more feature rich).

[Xipeos]

In the end, I really don't care - I just want to be able to play 1080p content on my machine with out bringing my dual core proc to its knees. I will use whatever driver gets me there first.

However I'd like it receive the british hdtv channels, which are encoded as h264 with CABAC

If you're using mplayer, play your files with -lavdopts fast:threads=2 or add "lavdopts=fast=1:threads=2" to ~/.mplayer/config . "fast" won't decrease video quality, and for even faster decoding you can use "-lavdopts skiploopfilter=all" (but you may get decreased video quality for low bitrate files that use the loop filter).

I realize it's not what you wanted chipsugar, but those 2 options for mplayer will make even 1080p videos with (very) high bitrate play smoothly.

or the opensource drivers get uvd sorted

Yeah, that's going to happen .