Anyone know of a good video card that decodes mpeg2 and mpeg4 streams with mythtv?

I currently have my frontend connected to a Samsung DLP via the 15 pin dsub connection at 1280x720p. NICE! I'll hopefully be getting my air2pc cards shortly so I'll have a sweet HDTV picture. I don't think my AMD 2500+ will be able to decode this massive stream. Any suggestions on a video card that has some hardware decoding?

I'm guessing that I will end up transcoding from mpeg2 to mpeg4 on the backend server because of the size of off-the-air HDTV streams (19gigs an hour!!). So, is there is a good video card that can take some of the work off the CPU for Mpeg2/4 streams?

Would the FX5200 video card be a decent choice if I was just doing mpeg2? can it handle this high of a resolution?

no cards at this point do a very good job of hardware decode (other than maybe the epia mini-itx motherboards particularly the new ones that do have mpeg4 support.) and other than the afore mentioned card I don't know of anything that has hardware mpeg4 acceleration at all even if it doesn't work well.

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Thanks for feedback.

Do you know if the FX5200 will even give that much of a boost over an nVidia onboard video? Is it worth the ~$45 to get? I hope it can do something with an HDTV size stream.

I wonder if I wold be better off with a larger CPU instead of the AMD 2500+ (FSB-333mhz/ 1.7Ghz?)? But, then i'd be out at least $120, not to mention a louder processor fan in the HTPC..

Just FYI, i'm moving most of the backend functions to a seperate box to get ready for two air2pc cards. I'm moving mythweb, mysql, file serving, etc), I'll have a PVR-250 in the frontend/backend box. This should lower the load on the frontend.

Thoughts & opinions on FX5200 vs larger CPU?

If you're not in a hurry, there is some work going on by the developers right now to fix up XvMC, which is the hardware assisted video driver for the nVidia cards. Once that software actually works, the requirements for viewing HDTV will go down dramatically.

I tried using an FX5200 and an Athlon XP 2500 and I was unable to watch HDTV programs which were recorded and played at 1080i. My set doesn't do 720p so I can't say for sure if yours would work or not. But I kind of doubt it. This was withOUT using the XvMC layer mentioned above because it did not work at the time.

I expect the new XvMC code will be working in 0.19 which shouldn't be too far away.

BTW -- the size of HDTV recordings is about 6-8G per hour, not 19G.

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I am using a 2500+ on a frontend, and I have found that if I do not de-interlace I can watch 1080i streams with no problem. I always could watch 720p streams with deinterlacing. So I just turned off deinterlaceing. I really don't notice the difference on a non-HDTV. To be honest I have a hard time telling the differenceon my HDTV, but I suspect that is because the signal is upconverted to 1080I anyway.

Before I got my 3000+ for my backend/frontend, I used the same 2500+. I found that I could not record and watch a 1080i program at the same time. I also could not watch a 1080i program while commercial detection was running, so I turned that off.

Also, if you have an older 2500+ they can be overclocked both by frontside bus and by multiplier...Ive heard about people running the equivelent of 3200+. I have overclocked my FSB to 175MHZ and 11.5 multiplier with no extra cooling or fiddling with voltages, but found I didn't need to with turning off de-interlacing

The 3000+ hasn't faltered yet. The only problem is that I cannot reliably watch Live TV, but I think that is a problem with 0.17, because I can't see how watching a recording at the same time as recording another stream is any different thean live TV. I've read some posts about not having this problem in 0.16, but I dont' want to go dig them up again.

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FRONTEND 1 - R5A16, Athlon 3000+, NVidia Motherboard, SB live, GeForce 5200, AA 9A60
FRONTEND 2 - R5A16, Athlon 2500+, Nvidia Motherboard, SB Live, GeForce 440MX, TV-OUT
BACKEND - R5A16, Althon 1700+, Nvidia MB, 2- HD3000's, 450GB LVM partition