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New Mac Pro has hardware H.264 decoding? Can someone check?
- Thread starter iBug2
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I'm running an '08 2.8x8 and just watched a 720P trailer of '9' and it barely tugged the CPU to 5%. H.264 is no strain on a MP.
I have 1080p trailers on 2.8x8 and they put up to 70% cpu load.
So it is a strain on the MP. Ofc you can watch it without any issues, but hardware acceleration is always welcome.
How does the new 8-core 2,26 Ghz Mac Pro perform when it comes to H.264 full HD video editing (in Final Cut Pro)?
Weird.
Anyway, it's unlikely to present a real-world problem as long as you're not using 3GB of RAM and a 5400rpm hard disk or something.
Hardware decoding is usually more a function of the GPU
and drivers etc. If the new Mac Pro is better in that regard,
it would likely be a combination of, say, the 4870 + special
drivers + Quicktime support.
Note: the 2008 Mac Pros already support hardware accelerated
decoding under Windows with the 8800GT (I don't know about
the other cards):
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2977
Yes but not on OS X.
Currently the only macs known to be supporting hardware acceleration under OS X are Macbooks and Macbook Pro's.
I'm afraid that's what you get on a minority platform: no hardware
decoding, no blu-ray, no Photoshop 64-bit, no Maya 64-bit, etc etc.
But the important thing here is that both the new and old MPs will
support it, if Apple writes the software. It's not about the machines,
per se, but the drivers. I.e., it's not about Mac Pro hardware, as the
subject line indicates. It's about OS X and Apple's willingness to do
the coding.
That's what I'm asking, if Apple DID write it for the Nehalem hardware, ie the new graphics cards. Currently Apple only supports hardware decoding on Macbooks and Macbook Pro's, one would assume they'd also support it on their newest machines. Can someone check this and clarify please? It's not rocket science.
AVCHD, which you may or may not have heard of, is H.264. And Panasonic, among others, are working on a new AVC-Intraframe compression method. So expect to see more H.264 being used in video editing. It is, after all, the codec of the future.
The boosts we're seeing are related to SSE 4, aren't they? The instruction set meant to boost video handling in hardware?
I suppose when you're looking at it that way it makes sense, I'm just used to converting everything to ProRes. So when someone says H.264, I'm thinking of straight up .mp4 files, not m2ts.
I believe SSE4 is CPU instruction set for multimedia - which is hardware acceleration. But I believe the acceleration the OP is referring to is GPU acceleration which would probably be proprietary to the GPU chipset and would require supporting drivers for OS X.
If H.264 hardware decoding isn't available for all Macs when Snow Leopard and Quicktime X is released, I'm gonna be annoyed!