Hardware Decoder on EPIA Boards

[lagrian]

Are you ever planning to use the potential of the MPEG2 decoder chip on the Via EPIA boards ?

At current not allot seems supports this chip , I think I have only heard people having sucess with Power DVD. So I am not sure if this is a hard thing to implement or its just not popular enough to warrant developers to support it.

I tried to find some developers information for it but with no luck.

[sub]

Ah VIA's marketing....

It hasn't really got a MPEG2 decoder, but it does have "hardware assist" extensions that can used by other MPEG2 software decoders to speed up the process slightly.

You can use this hardware assist functionality already with GB-PVR. If you use the Cyberlink MPEG2 decoder (installed with PowerDVD5), view the decoder settings and enable the "use hardware accellerator" option.

[lagrian]

aaaar thanks for clearing that up.

I'll put it on tonight, every little helps

Thanks

[Dai]

Just thought I'dd add a little to this!

I've got an EPIA ME 6000, I've tried using Power DVD 4 and Power DVD 5 and found that I get far superier quality out of version 4 than 5. 4 give perfectly smooth playback where as 5 does not.

[Chris.Day]

MPEG2 decode is provided by standard DXVA acceleration; and so theoretically any DirectShow MPEG2 decoder can take advantage of it. Unfortunately it's not quite that clear cut. VIA and SiS DXVA only seems to work properly with Cyberlink's decoders. I'm not sure about Nero Video Decoder; it appears to be related to Cyberlink PowerDVD, but then again it might just be a copy-cat interface. The decoder property pages are very different.

As for MPEG4 decode. I don't know if there are any standards for acceleration of this. I suspect that if anything can use it; it'd be the DivX decoder itself (I think they support acceleration on ATI cards).

[QQQ]

Hi, I see that you have a SP13000, can you get it to wake up when it needs to record? I can get it to hibernate but it doesn't seem to wake. There's no real detail on how this works for GB-PVR so I'm in the dark around diagnosis.

Thanks
Quentin.

[itguy]

I have a Matsonic MSCLE266-F motherboard with an built in 800 MHz Samuel II C3 processor. Most Epias have more processing power than this little guy.
Using Intervideo's WinDVD 4, it plays back DVDs with less than 50 percent CPU utilization.

I recently started capturing to MPEG on this box with GBRecord92 and an ADS Tech PTV-305 PCI card (12 percent CPU during capture by the way).

Playback of these MPEG files is flawless on the MSCLE266-F with WinDVD 4 with hardware acceleration turned on. This in spite of the fact that CPU usage stays at around 100 percent.

For what it's worth, I configured XP on this box using the Tuning Tips found at http://www.musicxp.net. I think I followed all the suggestions there except "9. Do Not Map Through Soundcard".

I do not know if more recent versions of Intervideo WinDVD work as well. I do know that my ASUS DVD, which I believe is PowerDVD 5, does not play back smoothly on my setup.

Assuming it can use them, GBPVR with WinDVD 4 codecs might be a nice setup for users of CLE266 chipsets.

[sub]

GB-PVR can already use WinDVD4 and other directshow decoders that support hardware accelleration. Nothing needs to be explicitly added to GB-PVR to support this.