Which cards support IDCT in hardware under the latest drivers?

[Porter]

Which Nvidia cards support IDCT in hardware using the latest drivers? I'm building a MythTV box for a friend, using relatively modest hardware (P4 3.0, AGP), and we are trying to offload as much as possible to the card.

By the way, 3D capabilities are not a feature that is relevant to this build, they will not be used.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!

[TechMage89]

If you get an nvidia FX card with the legacy drivers, xvmc works (at least it did on my FX5700 in my old computer.)

I am fairly sure that this is only mo-comp XvMC. I don't believe any nvidia cards have accelerated IDCT. As a matter of fact, that is not in the XvMC spec, so XvMC would have to be extended to support it (which I believe is done for the OpenChrome drivers for the VIA but not for anything else yet.)

That said, mo-comp XvMC ought to be sufficient for your friend. As I recall, when I used it, I could play DVDs with about 2-4% cpu usage on my old P4 (2GHz) machine (as opposed to about 30-40% with Xv)

With the specs you cited, he ought to be able to play back hi-def mpeg2 video without problems (providing the mo-comp is fast enough to handle it, but I think it is). However, I have to admit that's of limited utility, because there isn't a lot of mpeg2 HD video out there (except for ATSC TV)

[Porter]

Wait, so no Nvidia cards support IDCT under the 177.80 driver?

Do the current cards have any form of real video acceleration?

[deanjo]

Wait, so no Nvidia cards support IDCT under the 177.80 driver?

Do the current cards have any form of real video acceleration?

Nope. None of the current cards have any form of video acceleration in linux.

[TechMage89]

XvMC is video decode acceleration, and it's available on the FX line under the legacy drivers. It's not quite as good as IDCT, but there isn't even an api to do IDCT yet, but MC does eliminate, as I said, most of the load on the CPU, just not all of it.

Why do you need it for the new driver?