NVidia Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix - a game changer
This is big! No longer news, but hey, I’ll chime in there anyway…
The release by NVidia
With the release of their closed source driver 180.06 public beta, NVidia is now supporting PureVideo like functionality on Linux. The call it “Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix” (VDPAU).
This API supports hardware accelerated playback of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, H.264 and VC-1. Contrary to XvMC, there is great support of post-processing algorithms, such as de-interlacing and blending with the OSD. Actually VDPAU supports bob and weave deinterlacers, but also:
“motion adaptive temporal de-interlacing” and a “more advanced version of
temporal de-interlacing that additionally uses edge-guided spatial
interpolation”. It’ll also do IVTC, apparently, too.
Everything is offloaded to the GPU which means lower utilization of the CPU and thus lower noise and lower cost of your frontend. It also means that your old frontend might still have some life left in it. Just pop in a new NVidia card (Geforce 8+ required!) and you should be able to decode HD H.264!
The performance
How do I know this? Because it has been tested. Phoronix did some benchmarks on the new driver and as you can see, the numbers are quite impressive.
Also Scott Davilla did some testing with the combination of an Atom 330 and a PCI NVidia 8400 and he saw the CPU utilization drop to 1-2% on H.264 playback!
MythTV support
MythTV support is already available in trunk thanks to a patch by none other than Isaac Richards.
The future
The driver from NVidia is beta and so is the support in MythTV. But with the current speed of things, this could become useful, stable software, quite quickly.
Related posts:
[...] and 180.06 or 180.08 Nvidia drivers. Those are the components needed to get completely GPU hardware accelerated H.264 video playback. Now there is a new version of the driver from NVidia and with some interesting [...]