On 2/17/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Jarod Wilson</b> <<a href="mailto:jarod@wilsonet.com">jarod@wilsonet.com</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
On Friday 17 February 2006 09:49, Todd Ignasiak wrote:<br>> Does anyone here have more information, or pointers to more information on<br>> the MacOS X MPEG2 hardware acceleration code recently submitted to the svn?
<br>><br>><br>> I am very interested in this, but I have been unable to find any<br>> information beyond the couple mails on the dev mailing list.<br>><br>> Apparently, it's based on the "Accellent" project for reverse engineering
<br>> the API used by the apple DVD player (<br>> <a href="http://www.defyne.org/dvb/accellent.html">http://www.defyne.org/dvb/accellent.html</a> ).<br>><br>> I'm not sure how far along the project/code is.<br>
<br>Still not quite there yet, Nigel is still working on merging it all in,<br>getting it to build properly, etc. Watch the -dev list and -commits for<br>details.</blockquote><div><br><br>Thanks, I'll do that. <br></div>
<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> But, once stable, this<br>> would make the Mac Mini into an excellent HDTV MythTV frontend.
<br><br>I *highly* doubt that. Accellent appears to be more akin to Xv or XvMC<br>acceleration provided by an nVidia card, where you still need a fair amount<br>of cpu horsepower to watch HDTV. To use such a slow machine, you need a
<br>full-out hardware mpeg2 decoder, capable of handling HDTV-sized frames, more<br>akin to the UniChrome Pro. But I could be wrong.</blockquote><div><br>Yes, Accellent is reverse engineering MacOS APIs to the same
hardware functions used in XvMC and Windows DxVA (i.e. offloading the
motion compensation and iDCT portions of MPEG2 decoding to the GPU).<br><br>Prior
to moving to MythTV, I used some Windows HD software. On my old P3
933, using a Radeon 7000 and DxVA, I could do HDTV. My 1.42GHz
PowerPC G4 is quite a bit faster than that old P3. Unless the ffmpeg
and/or display code in Unix is much less efficient, I'm thinking the
Mini will have enough horsepower.<br> <br>-- I just checked the Accellent developer's site, and he said he tested playback of 720p content on a
1.25GHz G4, and it took only 25% of the CPU. That's even lower than I would expect, I'm anxious to see it in action in MythTV. </div><br></div>