[todd]

I'm a newbie here, but long time HTPC user..

Is there any info on video decoding acceleration plans for the Mac version? Such as:

- dvdv / accellant integration. MPEG2 acceleration by reverse engineering the Apple DVD Player APIs to the GPU. In the most recent Mac version of MythTV frontend, this support is included (though it might not be totally stable yet).

- OpenGL Shader Language (GLSL) Acceleration. This seems like a good long-term path, but I don't know about support in open source apps yet.

- Others??

- Any other hardware offload plans, such as de-interlacing or color space conversion?


If there are acceleration plans, do they assume a baseline capability of the GPU? Will the Mac Mini's integrated video meet this requirement?

[Gamester17]

No feature requests please, see the forum summery!

But to answer your question; no, no plans (no volunteering programmer = no plan = no code).
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=XBMC_for_Mac...or_XBMC.3F
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Hardware_Acc...o_Decoding

PS! The Mac mini Intel GMA950 does not support OpenGL 2.0 nor Pixel Shader Model 3.0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA#T...d_chipsets

[elan]

Is there any info on video decoding acceleration plans for the Mac version?

I can't speak to others' plans, but I have no current plans myself. I think the performance is quite acceptable without further hardware acceleration. Better parallelism in ffmpeg, coupled with some ideas for general decoding improvements would probably go a lot further and be a lot more portable.

Right now the only videos I have trouble with on my 2.0GHz mini are the ones that were badly encoded (i.e. Planet Earth).

-elan

[mxmumtuna]

I can't speak to others' plans, but I have no current plans myself. I think the performance is quite acceptable without further hardware acceleration. Better parallelism in ffmpeg, coupled with some ideas for general decoding improvements would probably go a lot further and be a lot more portable.

Right now the only videos I have trouble with on my 2.0GHz mini are the ones that were badly encoded (i.e. Planet Earth).

-elan

I might have missed it in another thread, but what in your Planet Earth test made it poorly encoded?

[elan]

I might have missed it in another thread, but what in your Planet Earth test made it poorly encoded?

The fact that it had insanely high bit-rate. When the source content will play, at a lower bit-rate, but the encoded x.264 content won't, and has higher bit-rate, something's not right.

-elan

[heronnu]

The fact that it had insanely high bit-rate. When the source content will play, at a lower bit-rate, but the encoded x.264 content won't, and has higher bit-rate, something's not right.

-elan

How high bit-rate did/does it have? I'm seing 1080 x.264 common around 8000-13000 bit-rate.

I'm thinking of buying the 1.8Ghz mini in a few days now and wondering if I'm bound to play 720p x.264 content or if it can handle 1080p with bitrates around above mentioned

Sorry if I'm off topic here

[Weavus]

The Planet Earth stuff peaked at about 45mbps I think.

[heronnu]

The Planet Earth stuff peaked at about 45mbps I think.

Wowzie, thats alot

[todd]

I can't speak to others' plans, but I have no current plans myself. I think the performance is quite acceptable without further hardware acceleration. Better parallelism in ffmpeg, coupled with some ideas for general decoding improvements would probably go a lot further and be a lot more portable.

Right now the only videos I have trouble with on my 2.0GHz mini are the ones that were badly encoded (i.e. Planet Earth).

Thanks for the response. I guess I'll do some more testing of my video playback. With 1080i MPEG2 video (MythTV recordings of broadcast TV programs) the CPU utilization of my 1.66GHz x86 Mini is over 100% (i.e. more than one of the cores of my Core Duo Mini). Given that performance, I'm surprised that others are able to handle HD H.264 video.

[platanito21]

IMHO your best bet moving forward is to get at least a 2.0ghz core2duo if you want to play most 1080p HD movies