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However one should bear in mind that bitstream decoding is generally fairly unforgiving of differences in video encoding. For bitstream encoding many x264 optimizations that people apply "break" bitstream decoding, so one has to bear that in mind. I suspect that for many videos it might be better just to do mc and idct and leave decode for the cpu.
What I understand is that today, there is no option to decode HD movies on GPU.
Recently i have installed Ubuntu on HP's xw4200 which is powered by Intel Pentium 4 551 @ 3.4GHz.
This machine is incapable of smooth playback of 720p movie.
Hate the idea that i'll have to install XP Media Center
Your machine is definitely powerful enough for 720p (unless it's ridiculously high bitrate and encoded with extreme h.264 options). latest mplayer with ffmpeg should work just fine. Just make sure to select your video renderer correctly, and don't run compiz. You should however get an optimized build of ffmpeg for the P4 as it helps in all the filters you would use like sharpening, deinterlacing, etc. (It doesn't help actual decoding though because of the assembly used from what I understand). ffmpeg works just fine on 720p movies on my little P-M 1.6Ghz. On the other hand, for 1080p I have to resort to CoreAVC on all the machines I have.
Your machine is definitely powerful enough for 720p (unless it's ridiculously high bitrate and encoded with extreme h.264 options). latest mplayer with ffmpeg should work just fine. Just make sure to select your video renderer correctly, and don't run compiz. You should however get an optimized build of ffmpeg for the P4 as it helps in all the filters you would use like sharpening, deinterlacing, etc. (It doesn't help actual decoding though because of the assembly used from what I understand). ffmpeg works just fine on 720p movies on my little P-M 1.6Ghz. On the other hand, for 1080p I have to resort to CoreAVC on all the machines I have.
Totem player sucks. It plays 720p movie on a machine with lost a/v sync and a lot of jerkyness, but M-Player, OTOH, handles it very smooth. The machine is a 5 year old P4 3.0C with a single channel DDR-400 and SIS chipset
Really? Ever tried Radeon driver on R500? THAT Compiz and Textured Video magically works together! So where is this architecture change come from?
I think Vighy was talking about tearing, which requires vblank timing be pushed from drm back up to the X driver, or that *some* command streams from the X driver be blocked by drm until vblank without holding up the *other* rendering. The best way to do that is still being debated, and general consensus is that the right way will be solved in Compiz as much as in the driver (since the real solution is page flipping after composition then flow control back up to the video player apps so that they skip & double frames as needed to stay synced with the compositor's page flipping).
The architectural change you are talking about is the ability for Compiz to redirect content drawn via OpenGL and direct rendering (ie Redirected Direct Rendering, which needs DRI2, which needs TTM/GEM, which is being done together with KMS).
These will come later, probably added by the community. It sounds like they're mirroring what the cards can do in Windows. There the cards have a very specific purpose: allow much slower CPU's to play HD video (of which, H264, VC1, and MPEG2 are the big ones.)
If they can get this out there, they will blow by Nvidia in a crucial segment: the HTPC one, because now folks can get small fanless motherboards and video cards and let the GPU do all the work.
Looks like they won't be blowing by them quite yet though, since Nvidia has their own acceleration now, though it is close source. Obviously if both are fairly on par with each other feature/quality/performance wise, I'd choose AMD or Intel because of the open source feature.
would be even more sad if that feature will not be backported!
I too hope that AMD extends XVBA to more chips than just R700. *AT LEAST* R600 and R500, given that VDPAU works with Geforce 8 and up.(three generations)
Even better would be if AMD just open sourced the thing considering that XVMC is somewhat old and completely lacks support for ATi/AMD chips.
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