[MPlayer-users] Fwd: cuda acceleration?

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 08:56:04PM -0700, Scott Doty wrote:
> So maybe mencoder doesn't have the architecture to exploit GPUs...but it 
> seems like there should be some way to to it, especially since other 
> transcoders have been successful at this.

That is a curious claim, decoders are not using the GPU as such and
would not work at useful speeds with CUDA-only, but even using the
special decoder hardware chip it tends to be slower on high-end
hardware, especially if you want to do custom post-processing.
Deinterlacing for example seems to be possible a good bit faster,
however that is filtering and I doubt anyone disputes that most of the
time that is a perfect match.
For encoding, I only know of Badaboom, which seems to be a joke. For all
I heard the best you can get out of it is a bit faster than x264 at
insanely worse quality.
Supposedly there is now a GPU-based encoder than gets similar
quality to x264 without psy optimizations (which means in reality still
a bit worse) and still only a bit faster.
So I honestly can't see anyone who is "successful" at this.
But anyway, I think there is currently an ongoing project for adding GPU
support to x264, however my suspicion is that it might mostly be used to
improve the quality without slowing encoding down with little to no
benefit for the fast encoding modes - but I admit I haven't really
followed it.