Hardware Decoder

[GJM]

I went to the store to get a video card that comes with NVDVD. I figured instead of buying it for $40 I'd get a spare card for just a little more. I found a 5200 Ultra that says that it has an "Integrated full hardware MPEG-2 Decoder". I take this to mean that it relieves the CPU of the decoding. It has DVI and TV out so I spent the extra money for it. I set it up with my digital LCD and HDTV. Works pretty good except that I still get around 70% CPU usage when playing MPEG-2 files or DVD's. To me that shows that the hardware decoder is not working. Anyone have any ideas?

[cmasters]

Any of the new cards claim they are hardware decoders. They are not. It is just marketing. What they are instead are hardware assist. There may be a setting in your decoder to turn this on. Look for some checkboxes that say Hardware Decode assist and Hardware Color Acceleration.

[WillP]

Make sure you have nvdvd installed, and the nVIDIA decoder selected in the SS web admin.

Once you're using the decoder, you can access the properties from a system tray icon when PVS is in windowed mode playing something. Make sure hardware acceleration is checked. Also to make hw acceleration work you might have to turn on hardware deinterlace in the web admin (this is a bug that should be fixed in the next version).

This should bring your cpu usage *for decoding* down to around 5% or so (depends on cpu).

Will