[mythtvnz] Freeview|HD - anyone tried a Mac?

[Wade Maxfield]

Nick Rout wrote:
> Occurs to me that at least some Mac models have hardware h.264 acceleration.
> Can Myth on Mac OSX use this acceleration? Has anyone tried this? Can other
> software on Mac OSX or Linux on a Mac access this feature?
> 
> Nick.
> 

The Apple supplied DVD player and other Apple apps use the graphic 
processor for hardware acceleration. I don't know of many other apps 
that can use it. I don't know if this is because Apple is using private 
APIs or not. There are some apps that use the GPU for video processing, 
but they're mainly effects like Blur, Sepia Tone, Inverting colours, etc 
(all effects provided by Core Image processing). I haven't seen much 
info floating round on using the GPU for video decoding (but I'm not a 
developer - so that doesn't count for much)

There was work a while ago on some code to try and use the DVD/MPEG2 
methods for playback. I think it stalled.

0.21 has some options under the playback profiles to use quartz-accel. 
This will try to use the graphics processor for MPEG2 playback.  This 
didn't work reliably on the machines I've tried (G5 Tower, G4 Tower, Mac 
Mini G4, Mac Mini Intel, MacBook Pro). Some crashed, and others didn't 
look that good when it did work.  I haven't tried this since 0.21 was 
first released.

As far as other apps on Linux using this, it's the same old story with 
ATI/Nvidia drivers not using hardware acceleration.  Once you're in 
Linux, it's just a PC with Nvidia or ATI graphics hardware (or even 
Intel embedded graphics on the Mini)

  - Wade