geforce FX Hardware MPEG-2 Decoder

[dami0n]

Hi,
I finally upgraded my viideo card to a FX5200, and was wondering more details about the "Integrated Full Hardware MPEG-2 Decoder".
Does this require special software/drivers to enable it to work ?
Or does it just always kick in when there's a mpeg-2 stream directed to the overlay?

I'm running the 5336 Linux drivers straight to the SVIDEO out, and haven't really noticed any performance increase.

[Kamel]

not sure, i seriously could never tell in windows if the card was doing the rendering or if it was the computer; so i really don't think it makes too much difference; though i could be wrong.

on the other hand, if i were guessing, the drivers will be all you need for this feature should the feature be supported in the release of the drivers you have installed. the driver gets to the video before it's put on your screen even in 2d mode, so i'm sure your drivers are "aware" of the movie overlay. that's only a guess, don't listen to me, lol.

[MontoyaSG]

it's to reduce the cpu load when decoding MPEG2 streams
MPEG2 streams are processed on the GPU rather than the cpu thus lighter cpu load on older systems

[dami0n]

Oh, it would seem I misposted this.
maybe i'll try again over in the video card forum.

[Thunderbird]

The geforce4mx and geforcefx contain mpeg2 decoding support (the support in the geforce4ti is less advanced). On linux the mpeg2 decoding isn't automaticly used. To use the mpeg2 decoding capabilities your mediaplayer needs to take advantage of it using the "XvMC" extension. Recent versions of xine and mplayer have an xvmc renderer, so when you use that cpu usage can drop a lot. (Note you need to enable xvmc)