I've been running a number of Mythboxes with Nvidia 5200 video cards for some time. They display HD all right with capable processors, but I was never able to get them to cooperate with running xvmc, & pull down the processor workload.

Time and Nvidia card numbers have rolled on (along with the drivers..) does anyone know if the newer Nvidia cards are working reliably with Myth and xvmc yet ?

I know the latest drivers do not support the 8xxx cards. (I only recently learned this) I thought the older models were good though.

I've had no luck with 5200 or 6200 cards with xvmc.

My FX5200 works with XvMC, but memory says that it did take a some minor adjustments to the configuration. Mostly in the xorg.conf AFAIR. I've almost certainly posted something on this count before, so a search should turn up the details...

I'll look into that, but you've spent a bunch of time (way back) working with me on trying to get that working, with no luck (on my systems..). whether it's the (IBM) motherboards or the exact vendor for the card we never settled, but I never got it to work & settled for brute horsepower. (Which works, but I forgo realtime processing commercials...)

I discovered that most of the built-in nVidia graphics (7000 series) do not support XvMC as well. It seems that XvMC is slowly dying a death of attrition in nVidia graphics cards. I do not hold much hope that it will reverse soon.

Most of the built-in graphics seem to be ATI or Intel these days, depending on whether you get an AMD or Intel chip. I'm beginning to wonder if ATI's high-def support is any worse or better than nVidia's. At this point, I only care about 1080i output, since I'm driving an RPTV at that resolution. The interlaced support of Myth and nVidia leave a lot to be desired!

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thought this might be of interest:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... dpau&num=1

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That's an interesting article. Maybe nVidia will get its excrement together after all. Here's a followup article showing the CPU usage of the new "beta" driver:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... dpau&num=1

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So I decided to revisit using XvMC on a spare Mythbox that was retired from SD service. It's a 1.8 ghz Pentium (IBM) that was being used to record HD 'overflow' programs, but wasn't fast enough to display them without major pausing.

The suggested reading was new since the last time I tried this, and the key seemed to be adding the line- Option "NVAGP" "1" to the xorg.conf file. This worked (with a 5200 card) and the 1.8 machine could play recorded 1080 HD without pausing, although the sound was a bit 'gravelly'. (Confirmed by a B&W OSD..) My next experiment will be to try it on a 2 ghz IBM & see if the extra CPU speed gets rid of the gravel in the sound.

I have a 3.6 ghz machine that hasn't gone into service with 'the civilians' yet, and I'll try that with XvMC too. Not sure getting some CPU cycles back will be worth a B&W OSD and possible less picture definition, just to allow real-time commercial processing...

Thanks for the steer guys, and thanks for the articles on future direction of display technology !

I've had good luck getting my 6200 card working.
In the past I've had to do some tweaking to get xvmc working with the installed nvidia driver.
But with R5.5, it just worked! No tweaking required.

Thanks all who help make this so easy.

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