Help with setting hardware decoding

[andycee]

Hi,

Need some help with getting either Placeshifter/Client to use my hardware MPEG2 decoding.

I'm running a fairly low power system as my client, and am getting the CPU maxed out, making resposivness a problem. I'm guessing that the system is decoding in software which is the issue.

Client H/W:
Jetway J7F5M Fanless 1.2GHz Eden C7 VGA and DVI Motherboard
Specifications: 1.2GHz C7 Eden CPU; CX700M chipset; Supports up to 1GB on 240-pin DDR2 400/533 DIMM socket; 6 channel VIA VT1708A 6 channel audio; Integrated Unichrome Pro II graphics with MPEG-2 decoder acceleration (supports up to 128MB Shared Memory).

Tried playing around with some of the settings in Video/Audio setup, but nothing seems to work to reduce the load.

What should these settings be to force h/w decoding ?

thanks

[andycee]

OK. So, thanks to a very interesting review on another motherboard using the VIA VX700 chipset, it would appear that :

http://www.mini-itx.com/reviews/pico...ult.asp?page=7

"The VX700 chipset on the PX supports "Integrated UniChrome Pro II 3D/2D AGP with MPEG-2/4 and WMV9 Video Decoding Acceleration" according to the literature. VIA do not provide the full package though. They provide a display driver capable of supporting hardware acceleration, leaving the decoder to third party developers who have already paid license fees for the various technologies involved (e.g. the MPEG LA, DVD Forum and Dolby).

What this means in practice is: To accelerate WMV9 you need to patch Windows Media Player to support DXVA, and to accelerate MPEG-2 playback you need to buy Cyberlink PowerDVD - and if you want MPEG-4 acceleration you'll need the Max or Deluxe version currently retailing at $59 and $69."


I installed PowerDVD 7, and after selecting CyberLink Video/SP Decoder (PDVD7) as the MPEG2 Decoder in Sage Client, indeed my CPU load had dropped to a more managable 35-40%. Great stuff !

[CollinR]

My Intel D201GLY2A Little Valley will be here tomorrow.

http://www.intel.com/products/mother...GLY2/index.htm

I have a variety of projects to play with and SageTV client and server will be 2 of them.

[CollinR]

Posting on the Little Valley booted from write protected CF, I have played with placeshifter while on the HDD and had no problems.

[Taddeusz]

As far as I'm aware that's how it's always been. The decoder must support hardware acceleration in order to work.

That being said I don't believe Placeshifter uses hardware acceleration at all. However I could be wrong. It does use it's own built-in decoder for everything and AFAIK cannot use external decoders.