ATI HD3870 Native h.264 support

[bastian74]

Can anyone speak to the ability of the card to decode h.264?
I've heard it's hit or miss... is there some specific codec that has to be used for it to work? I know the merits of the codecs get all jacked up as you install players etc. Do you have to always ensure the ati one has the highest merit?

When it is hardware decoding, is the cpu effectively idle?

[Djc208]

The ATI hardware has the ability to do most of the heavy lifting for H.264 playback. But only when properly activated by the codec doing the playback.

The graphics driver alone won't enable this feature, and I don't thin ATI's AVIVO will either. As far as I know the only ones that support it right now are the stand-alone DVD playback software (ArcSoft and Avermedia I think).

The CPU still has to handle the disk access and a few other odds and ends, as well as the usual background tasks, so no it's not idle, but it's much lower depending upon your CPU speed and number of cores.

[vexhold]

I am actually curious myself on the whole capabilities of this card as I am using one in my system and have been having extreme difficulties with h.264.

Is there somewhere I can read up on the actualities?

Maybe someone who has gotten the Radeon HD 3870, the HD-PVR and SageTV to all play nice together?

I myself have gotten close, but close still isnt cutting it for the WAF.

[bastian74]

What does graphedit show as the codecs being used? I would assume it has to be the ati universal codec for the hardware decoding to work.

[Djc208]

A quick search on ATIs site found this: http://support.ati.com/ics/support/d...estionID=21594

It's for the older cards but my understanding is nothing much has changed. The newer software they list works better but otherwise the default codec's don't support this just these aftermarket ones.

[phelme]

the 3450 has hardware decoding of H.264 so I think the 3870 would as well. I had one working with the ArcSoft decoders. CPU load was around 10%. but my particular card started to get all flaky with "shimmering" video so I took it out ( it was only $20 ).

my old 1650XT also works fine, but CPU load is more around 70% with HD-PVR 1080i .ts files.

[bastian74]

It appears only a couple applications use the hardware decoder and I'm guessing there's a good chance SageTV isn't one of them.