On Tue, 2010-01-05 at 17:29 +0000, Tony Houghton wrote:
On Tue, 5 Jan 2010 15:01:41 +0000 Laz laz@club-burniston.co.uk wrote:
The trouble with a purpose-built decoder is that it takes up a valuable PCI(-E) slot when there are plenty of motherboards with onboard graphics which should be able to do hardware decoding, even if it does currently limit the choice to NVidia. In the short term (providing software as well as drivers supports these cards) a separate decoder has the advantage that you could pair it with ATI graphics and benefit from FRC too.
I think that the future may ultimately lie with OpenCL.
The Crystal HD decoder will doubtless appear in netbooks very soon, and I fully expect thin Intel Atom PCs to also feature it on-board. When those boards/machines appear, we will be on the way to a *reliable* open source STB which supports modern HD codecs + playback.
As the driver is being taken into the linux mainline kernel, it'll be one less piece of the puzzle to have to checkout nightly SVNs for or rely on a binary blob from NVidia for. That additional choice is surely of great benefit to us all.
Maybe then I'll be able to replace my aging FF technotrend card + full-height case :) ... and best of all I'll then be able to justify spending a small fortune on an LCD or Plasma :D
gdh