Viewing a 1080i video file

[golgotha]

I have a 6600GT and when viewing a 720 or 1080i video file, I get screen pauses. (Using both xine and mplayer)
My machine is 3GHz, 1GB RAM so I don't think it's my system.

Can the 6600GT just not handle playback of HD content?

Will going to a 7xxx series card fix my problem?

[Thunderbird]

There are so many things that can influence performance of HD content. First of all on Linux the GPU doesn't help that much, there's only Xv support for scaling (though it uses simple texturing on modern cards like on your 6600gt) and there's XvMC but that's only for Mpeg2.

All decoding of your HDTV content if it is not Mpeg2 which the CPU has to do all the work. This is a big task. The more optimized the codecs of the media player, the better the performance (dual-core would also help a lot) On windows the gpu can assist with decoding mpeg4/h264 and other codecs but this is not offered on Linux at the moment.

Overall I don't think your videocard is a problem but more the not so great linux support for HD-content.

[golgotha]

Thank you for a very informative reply.

In mplayer, I did switch the video driver to use both xv and xvmc with dramatic frame rate increases.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. My content is now watchable

[cthulhu]

Originally Posted by Thunderbird

On windows the gpu can assist with decoding mpeg4/h264 and other codecs but this is not offered on Linux at the moment.

If only nVidia would comment on their PureVideo HD linux counterpart. A statement regarding plans to implement any or all of the following features would be superb:

• IVTC - Inverse Telecine (Improves picture quality on content with a frame rate different from the monitor refresh rate)
• Hardware assisted MPEG4 decoding
• Hardware assisted h264/x264 decoding
• HD TV-out for PAL (50Hz for component/RGB)