[mythtvnz] GeForce xfx 6200 & WinTV-NOVA-TD 500?

[Nick Rout]

On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 2:13 PM, mythtv <mythicalbeast at slingshot.co.nz> wrote:
>
>> > Feeling sure I will attract much derision, does anyone have any comment
>> > about this board and my steadfast commitment to making old dogs to new
>> > tricks:
>> > http://www.reel-multimedia.com/en/extension_linux_technische_daten.html
>>
>> Interesting looking device, but very expensive (150 euro). Also
>> probably requires a patch to mythtv. The pdf says that drivers and
>> "sample apps" are included.
>>
> Looks like a good solution for a commercial set-top box.
> All their products look German impressive..
> If this device can do h.264 playback on 10W what is nVidia doing with
> the other 100W !
> But I did not think PCI or AGPx8 had the bandwidth for true HD1080
> playback..

Come on, PCI is 133 MB/s, the highest rate video you are likely to
find is a bluray at 48 Mb/s, that's plenty of room for overhead!

That's obviously feeding the encoded video straight to the card, you
are possibly correct if you are trying to decode on the cpu and
transfer the raw stream to a video card over PCI, I haven't done the
math.

Remember these cards probably use an API that myth and other media
players do not (yet) know how to play with. We know that myth, xbmc
and mplayer can adapt to these things pretty quickly (vdpau was ported
to mythtv within a very short time, nvidia released a patched mplayer
as a sample app, XBMC had vdpau pretty quickly and support for the
Crystal HD is already a reality in XBMC. Strangely mythtv has not
jumped on the crystal as quick as might be expected.)

Whether software writers jump on these devices depends on demand I
guess. vdpau seems to be filling the mythtv demand at present.

> The Optiplex 620 740 745 could be a good HTPC box but most of them have
> an ATI videocard to dispose of..

Anything without a PCI-E slot is a bit of a dead end if you want GPU
acceleration. There are PCI nVdida cards that do VDPAU, but I have
seen posts that suggest they aren't exactly the bees knees. Hard to
get in this part of the world too. Someone on this list offered me one
for his cost price of (IIRC) about $200-300. Frankly you'd be better
saving a bit more and buying a revo. Mine was $450 on trademe, plus
$40 for another G of RAM. And it's quieter and uses less power than
some old dell clunker.