Having been on the list for some time I was familiar with nvidia +
xvmc combination and wanted to try it out. I picked up an evga
GeForce FX 5200 PCI adapter and stuck it into my SIS based P4
Northwood 2.4GHz Pundit system. (Note: not the Pundit-R) Setup was
done under Gentoo 2005.0 using all stable packages with kernel 2.6.12-
r4. I wanted to put down some notes for others who might be
considering the same.
My goal was to evaluate the xvmc + nvidia playback quality for future
HDTV use. For playback I used xine-lib 1.1.0 and xine-ui 0.99.4 along
with a few 1920x1080i and 1280x720p clips. I also used some standard
DVD video to compare xv with xvmc processing. My viewing was focused
around deinterlacing and artifacts that might be seen from post
processing. For a display I used DVI out at 1280 x 720 to my
Panasonic PT-L500U projector.
Setup of nvidia + xvmc on Gentoo is well documented and went off
without a hitch using nvidia-kernel 1.0.7667. Over all I was
impressed with the results. Using xvmc I was able to easily playback
1080i clips with about 35% cpu use. Considering the low end PCI bus
on the Pundit system board and the low end GPU on the FX 5200.
I had two issues that for me are critical.
When using xvmc with Xine none of the OSD overlays would work. This
meant no on screen information, subtitles, or closed captions during
playback. I didn't investigate this to much however I think it could
be worked around. One possibility seems to be with the Xine xxmc
support.
XvMC appears to do very simple one-field deinterlacing in hardware.
Xine 1.1.0 has experimental XvMC bob deinterlace support which I
enabled and saw some improvements. I compared various DVD (480i
content) scenes played via Xv with Xine deinterlace post processing
and XvMC with hardware deinterlace. It was pretty clear to me that Xv
with deinterlace post processing was producing a much better picture
than XvMC using hardware deinterlacing.
Based on my testing I think using nvidia + xvmc could be acceptable
when dealing with HDTV streams but should be avoided for standard
NTSC 480i content or where ever else it isn't absolutely needed. The
best solution, from an image quality standpoint, would be to avoid
XvMC and use a powerful system to handle the HDTV content decoding
and playback. Obviously that solution brings with a host of other
problems dealing with heat and noise.
Right now I'm unsure of which direction I'll go in. I know I will be
scraping my pundit and setting up a full FE/BE in a nice HTPC case
like the ones Silverstone makes. The cheap solution, for me, is to
get a socket 478 ATX board that supports my existing P4, memory, and
other hardware then add in a quality Nvidia AGP based adapter.
Considering the prices of nice looking HTPC cases and silent power
supplies this might be the way to go as an interim step.
--
Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
AIM: BlueCame1
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