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To connect to our digitial display we need to have a graphics card that supports a digital connection.

We have four main choices today. ATI, Nvidia, Via Unichrome, and Intel. Some of you may have Matrox cards which have good Linux support, but are harder to find.

Intel
intel make arange of Graphics Accelerators that are only really available as integrated graphics on Motherboards and laptops. They offer good price performance, and more importantly fully Opensource drivers. As a result these drivers are directly available within SUSE. The Web site for these open drivers are at http://www.intellinuxgraphics.org/

Via Unichrome
The Unichrome tends to be built into motherboards these days especially the small form factor MiniITX motherboards and PC's. The Unichrome drivers have now been open sourced by Via to some extent, but sadly they did not go all the way. The press release is Here. In anycase an Opensource project for the drivers had already been started. The Unichrome project can be found Here.

The OOTB Drivers will display Video just fine and with a Duron 900Mhz or above processor should give you good picture performance, but may not give you full video and 3D acceleration that the card is capable of providing. The OOTB drivers are based on Opensource code that currently has only experimental support for 3D. As a result you may want to install the proprietary graphics card drivers from ATI and Nvidia.

ATI and Nvidia
With ATI and Nvidia  based cards you have the option of using either the Open source drivers or the closed source Binary drivers. The Open source drivers come out of the box with openSUSE. You can read more about these at Free3D.org.

Since the release of OpenSUSE 10.2 the ATI open source driver provides a very good alternative to the binary drivers for those that don't need the last ounce of 3D performance. There is also a new project called nouveau to reverse engineer a open source accelerated driver for Nvidia cards.

Video acceleration
As we are Media freaks we want to make sure that we squeeze the most performance out of our video cards as possible. We also want to reduce the load on the processor so that we get nice smooth video. This has become much more important now with HD TV and HD Video. There are two key hardware features that we are interested in. Xv  and XvMC. Linux graphics desktops make use of the Xwindow system from MIT. The SUSE implementation is from X.org

Xv and video acceleration
Xv is an extension to Xwindow that provides for video integration into the desktop environment. Basically Xwindow provides a rectangular window that video devices can render the video into. The rendering of this video window will be hardware assisted with the correct drivers installed.

XvMC X video motion compensation
XvMC is an extension to Xv that allows for Hardware acceleration of the Video in the Xv window for MPEG video streams. This is especially needed with DVD's and DVB broadcast streams. The reason for this is because these video streams are typically compressed like Zip files and need to be decompressed before they can be displayed. Both DVD and DVB use MPEG2 as the Video compression. XvMC provides hardware decompression of MPEG2 video streams.

The good news is that MythTV as of 0.20 now supports XvMC.

As of Jan 2008 there is no XvMC support for ATI cards, but we do have XvMC for Nvidia and Unichrome

X Composite Manager/render acceleration
The X -window system that ships with openSUSE 10.3 is Xorg 7.3 There are now  extensions to support a new overlay video driver in conjunction with Xv. This is designed to offer some of the sexier User Interface items such as transparent windows and icon shadows. There are currently two implementations of this new capability. XGL and AIGLX.  A new compositing window manager called Compiz-Fusion has been now available that  gives you these new effects.  See the section on Desktop Effects on this web site.

This is potentially important to us because to support these advance features a new technology is being incorporated for improved rendering performance. This will have a direct impact on video acceleration for High Definition Video.

Proprietary Acceleration and Rendering
Witht the advent of High Definition Video, it is becoming increasing difficult for the CPU to cope with the performance requirements of modern media applications. It makes sense to shift this workload onto the Graphics card.

ATI and Nvidia are now putting more effort to differentiate their products in the Multi-media world, and extending their cards to support advanced Video Rendering as well as 3D acceleration. ATI have released a range of features under the AVIVO banner, and in particular offers h.264 acceleration. Nvidia have released a range of features under the PureVideo banner, focusing on improved video rendering and Scaling.

Best card for SUSE multimedia
Whats the best card for Multimedia in my experience?

As of January 2007 Nividia cards offer a much better user experience if you want to use the proprietary drivers. The drivers can now be installed directly from YasT.
If you want to use the Open Source drivers then the ATI cards are better. The Open Source "Radeon " driver offers Xv acceleration as well as composite right out of the box.