Legacy & MPEG-4

L

LstBrunnenG

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jun 3, 2003
Messages
6,676
I'm (still) thinking of making a 550 MHz PIII machine into a Gentoo server. If I bought it something like this FX5200, yes, it would have the gaming performance of a retard with half its brain removed, but would it be able to output MPEG-4 to a TV with mplayer? No GUI, just a bare X server and mplayer via SSH. Please let me know whether this is possible, impossible because of the processor, or possible with more GPU power. Thanks.
 
Bump? Come on, don't tell me linux junkies don't try to push older machines to their limits.
 
yep, with xvmc enabled with mplayer (or mythtv or whatever), it will offload SOME of the mpeg-4 stream but not all of it. I can't say for certain if a 500mhz will be enough, I think it probably will be okay with that card. You should be able to find a 5200 on the for sale/trade forum for dirt cheap :).
 
i don't think 5200's can do any type of video rendering... aren't they basically a gf4mx ?
 
If the video card can't help with the video decoding, then you will have trouble with that setup. I remember having a PIII 600 that would have trouble with Divx or xviD stuff every once in a while. On most things it didn't have a problem but there were problems on occasion.

You'd be better off looking for a processor with a little more power or a video card that has hardware mpeg4 support in Linux.

 
LstOfTheBrunnenG said:
Which GPUs would those be?
Click to expand...

That, I am not sure of. With the speed of the systems I run Divx, xviD and x.264 encoded files on, I don't have a problem with anything CPU wise so I haven't looked into it.

You may find some trouble, though. Linux generally doesn't do the best with ATI cards but it seems ATI cards have had the better quality when doing hardware decoding versus nVidia. At least in the Windows space.

I might be able to test it out as I have one machine with a Radeon 9600XT in it with openSUSE and my main system is an nVidia 7600GT with openSUSE. I'm not sure how exactly to test it, though as I see nothing in the drivers about enabling or disabling video card hardware acceleration for video codecs. Also, the implementation of the hardware acceleration may not be as good with Linux drivers as it is with Windows drivers. I'm afraid someone else will have to jump in with the answer. I'm also thinking that you might need a "newer" card to do this if it is possible.

 
XvMC is what you need to be reading about. It has worked with nVidia cards in Linux since the GeForce 4 era. The amount it will help is unknown. I have a 7300GS in a X2 3600+ machine, and the card does a big portion of the video.
 
You win two rolleyes smilies:
:rolleyes: the link goes to XboX Media Center (XBMC)'s page about.......XvMC
:rolleyes: XvMC doesn't currently help with MPEG4 decoding when paired with NVidia cards.
 
The problem you are going to run into is that mpeg4 is still relatively new and to have that type of support built into hardware for decoding will require a newer card. I know some of them will do hardware decoding but they will be newer. And the drivers to support the hardware decoding may or may not be present in Linux. I'm pretty sure the lower end ATI 2xxx series of cards have it but I'm not sure if any of them are AGP or if they are all PCI-e. Also, most people like to tell horror stories concerning ATI cards and hardware support in Linux.

I believe most of the lower end nVidia 8xxx series of cards also has the hardware support, but again, you may have trouble finding an AGP flavor. I'm not sure about that as I have not looked at AGP cards in a long time.

 
I did a little looking on nVidia's website last night concerning nVidia cards and hardware acceleration of MPEG4 decoding. They have a pdf on the site which will give you a listing of cards which have the PureVideo (I think it's called) capabilities and what cards support what. It looks like the 6xxx series and on have the PureVideo but different aspects. It also looks like some of the AGP cards don't have the same capabilities as the PCI-e brethren so you'll have to keep a lookout.

Also, I heard that nVidia charges for some of the software or whatever for PureVideo although I'm not sure how true that is. Also, I didn't look to see if the PureVideo support is in the drivers or anything for Linux. You'll just have to do some of the research on your own for that.

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top