Hardware Talk :: Does the DSL store sell a media server?
Did you ever find out if this worked? id also like a silent media system. Was not sure if it could be doneIt is. Here's what I know about hardware movie acceleration:
Playing movies "motion compensation" and "iDCT" have to be calculated. Most graphic cards can do those, but many drivers cannot. If the cpu has to do those, 1,5Ghz isn't enough for HD content, or 700Mhz for dvd-quality. But when gpu handles those, dvd can be played with 50Mhz Pentium with 50% usage..
Nvidia & intel drivers can do those with Mpeg-2 (dvds), Via's can do mpeg-2, mpeg-4, h.264 and some other newer formats.
So, get one with Intel, Via or Nvidia graphics sys ;)
PS. Yes, Ati has no support on Linux for hardware movie accel, even though that has been possible from Rage II+dvd..For example that 533Mhz fanless they sell has a Via chip but only capable of mpeg-2 accel.. This has the same graphics chip, but is smallerJust to make things straight...
Quote
PS. Yes, Ati has no support on Linux for hardware movie accel, even though that has been possible from Rage II+dvd..
No, that is possible. Those older cards can use the "ati" driver, and use "xv" for video acceleration (i.e. 720x480 h.264 movies played fine with my p2). There's also the radeon driver (haven't used this one). And the fglrx driver which supports AVIVO.I was talking about frglx, the official driver.. Seems that it has some kind of support for those newest cards.. But that AVIVO is just an api, which even Mplayer cannot use yet. The linux world uses Xvmc..