CAVLC and CABAC entropy offload on MAC?

[benjatelcom]

Question for anyone running 1080p h.264 video on a Mac:

If you are running a UVD(ATI) or PurevideoHD(nVidia) video card, such as an Radeon 2400 or better, or nVidia 8000 or better, what is your CPU utilization when decoding this video?

My PC based server runs at 7% CPU utilization @ 1Ghz while decoding 1080p H.264 or VC1 with DD 6 channel audio.

My wife's Macbook Al. should be able to do this in hardware with its 9400M graphics, but with a 2.0Ghz CPU it is probably too slow to decode in software.

[iconic]

There is no public API for UVD or PureVideo on Mac OS X. That's been a thorn in the side of many developers since they transitioned to Intel...

A 2 GHz Core2 duo should be able to decode 1080p content in CPU just fine. The major bottleneck is getting the raw pixels to the screen at those rates since it can't decode directly to the framebuffer.

1920 x 1080 x 2 = 4,147,200 bytes per frame, 60 fps = 248,832,000 bytes/s or just over 124 million pixels per second and they have to go through (thankfully hardware assisted) colorspace conversion first. Add that rate for each memory copy along the way, you can easily push just shy of 1 gig per second if you're not careful. Even with only one mem copy, 1080p video brings a GMA-950 to it's knees.

[benjatelcom]

Just updated to 10.6 and there is an API in use to do this now... tested working with HTML5 and 1080p H.264 content, and flash.

Is Sage supporting this?