CrashnBrn Wrote:What has your experience been with poorly encoided MKV or AVI files on the ION platform? My assumption (which my be wrong) has been that if it's not encoded properly a higher end CPU/GPU combo can crunch through the issue and still play the file back with few hiccups, while a less powerful machine would be struggling to play the content back.
I will talk about XBMC Live here, as I think that applies best to understanding what works and why.
Well Avi/Divx on ION just uses the Atom CPU, just like everything else. Divx upscaling for ION2 is currently not working in XBMC. So that is no different between platforms, the Atom is more than enough for divx. Which is good, as there are more terrible divx encodes out there than anything.
For x264, mkvs and m2ts files, as you know there are many different kinds. The professionally encoded ones (straight Blu Ray rips) work on ION as well as anything else with VDPAU, and better than CPU anything.
With poorly encoded stuff its a mixed bag. ION will play everything, unlike the Broadcom card that has many displace artifacts with those rips. In fact, ION does amazingly well: playing pretty much every encode I throw at it with more ease than any CPU setup (and I've thrown a quad 3.0 GHZ Intel at it) I have seen. VDPAU works amazing for poorly encoded stuff, and shows that Nvidia really has a good decoding backend. I have tons of rip (like 1000+) and 99% work great.
The ONLY place I have seen a CPU setup provide a superior decode (the 1%) is when the x264 video is more than encoded poorly- when its a bunch of x264 videos spliced poorly. One place this is often seen is with OTA HD videos of older stuff where the movie has the commercial breaks crudely taken out.
In these cases the VDPAU backend stops the movie at those points, while in some cases a CPU decoding setup will "power through." Yet for me these rips are so rare that when I encounter them I just remux the mkv for good measure. That usually fixes the problem.
Seriously, GPU based decoding as provided by ION and NVidia really work well. I used to be REALLY against hardware based decoding (based on inadequacies I know hardwired boxes like PCHs and AppleTVs have), but VDPAU has convinced me.
One final note: When VDPAU is enabled, it barely needs any extra CPU. A single core Atom can honestly do the job. So there is no way extra CPU helps, the only really to have extra CPU is for menus and when VDPAU doesn't apply like with Flash content.
That is why I think the ION is such a safe play. And it gets safer as time goes by:
http://www.linuxtech.net/news/VDPAU_Supp...lugin.html