x264 acceleration

I'm interested in eventually building a low-ish power HTPC, probably MythTV-based or something similar. I would like to use a VIA CPU because I am constantly impressed by their offerings. There are some VIA mini-itx platforms that offer PCI-E 16x slots, and in one of them I'd install one of the modern video cards.

Which brings me to my question - a fanless VIA CPU will not be enough to play 1080p x264 encoded movies, which is my primary concern. I have a Core2 Conroe machine at 2.6Ghz that I currently use for playback with a fanless Nvidia 7600GS that can play the movies smoothly with mplayer, but not VLC (mplayer kicks ass). What can I do to get smooth H.264 playback from a fanless VIA platform? Do the more modern "HD" nvidia cards have hardware H.264 acceleration, and does it work with the proprietary nvidia drivers / mplayer?

Is anybody out there running a system like the one I describe? Can anyone recommend a fanless GPU that does what I need it to?

As far as I know, x264 is decoded using the processor only on Linux. Correct me if I am wrong. I have a X2 4200, 7600GT, MPlayer compiled from source and 1080 videos played with hiccups here and there.

A quick Google shows that nvidia cards have a h264 decoder but for Windows only unless times have changed and I am living under a rock.

yea, for the time being all video decoding on linux is CPU only. i've heard rumors about intel and ati efforts in the works, but i wouldn't count on anything this year. phoronix is probably your best resource for keeping up to date with the happenings on the video front. i have to use the -framedrop option in mplayer on my 3800+ X2 to get smooth 1080p playback
you're probably much better off with a stripped core 2 duo like the e7200 or similar paired with a g45 mATX board (which should in the future support hardware decode). otherwise any old chipset/gpu combo will do
EDIT apparently the ICH10 southbridge's SATA controller is only supported on >= 2.6.26 so you'll need a very recent distro/livecd (read Ubuntu 8.04 is too old)

Thanks guys. I can hold off for a while to let development .. develop.

That sucks... Win support but not NIX support! xvmc does mpeg-2 but no hardware acceleration for x264/h264 under LINUX?

I want x264 hardware acceleration, watching my HD backups on linux is painful at the least!

Keep developin people, nd hurry up my popcorns gerrin eaten LOL

yeah, with linux you're pretty much dependent on cpu acceleration for x264. when I built my HTPC, I specifically went for a higher end cpu (E8400, right when it came out) and just a crappy geforce 8400 and that has worked fine. there are patches out there for mplayer that enable multithreaded h264 decoding (beyond the slice-based multithreading currently present) but I only ever had luck compiling it on older versions of mplayer and for all I know they finally updated libavcodec to have better multithreaded support.

libavcodec has had multithreaded support for a while now, but its still slice-based (though CABAC is done in a separate thread too).
Hate to nitpick, but x264 is an encoder. It encodes H.264 streams. So you're looking for H.264 acceleration.

Snowknight26 said:

libavcodec has had multithreaded support for a while now, but its still slice-based (though CABAC is done in a separate thread too).
Hate to nitpick, but x264 is an encoder. It encodes H.264 streams. So you're looking for H.264 acceleration.

Click to expand...

*edits post*

Don't know what you're talking about, friend