[Videos] H264 Acceleration at the Video Card

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Somec

Contributor
Veteran XX
How does this work?

Isn't the H264 decoded by whatever codec the video player uses first before being sent out to the vid card? If that's the case, then the CPU is doing the majority of the work, thereby making the video card acceleration kind of pointless.
 
my legitimately obtained backup copies of the movies i legally own run at 120fps

i got through the departed in 20 minutes
 
ya, but do I need a special player? Is there a special codec that says 'hey, this is h264, let's send it straight to the vid card'? There's a step here I'm probably not understanding
 
I never had an MPEG decoder card, but I'd imagine it comes with drivers and a codec that you'll have to use for it to work.
 
Somec said:
ya, but do I need a special player? Is there a special codec that says 'hey, this is h264, let's send it straight to the vid card'? There's a step here I'm probably not understanding
Click to expand...

You got it right. You need a player optimized to use the video card's special instructions, i.e. latest powerDVD.
 
Somec said:
How does this work?

Isn't the H264 decoded by whatever codec the video player uses first before being sent out to the vid card? If that's the case, then the CPU is doing the majority of the work, thereby making the video card acceleration kind of pointless.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the thing about video decoding is that unless you have a graphics card that's designed specifically for that purpose - they had a few DVD decoders you could buy that would do this kind of stuff, the graphics card doesn't actually render the video.

nVidia made some bold promises with their 6800 line of 3D Accelerators that was supposed to use the then ultra powerful processor on it - which apparently had more computational processing capability then a Pentium4 Extreme Edition processor had.

nVidia fell through on this though, the drivers never enabled the capability, and I believe several people attempted a class action lawsuit against nVidia over this because it was advertised as capable, out of the box, on several first gen sets of these cards.

I'm not sure what, if anything, came from any attempted lawsuits.
 
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