ATI hardware mpeg2 decoding/deinterlacing

Hi all!

I was looking for a soft for TV viewing on Windows in the last days. I stumpled upon ProgDVB and found out about its DirectShow interface.

I was able to use the filters and decoders I like best by simply building my own chain of them using the included graphedit.exe.

I didn't want to use the default filters suggested by ProgDVB (Elecard). But I was able to setup a chain using DScaler5 mpeg2 decoders. The picture was very good, comparable to the one I get with tvtime in Linux.

But CPU consumption was as high as the one from tvtime, ~50-60% with a Sempron 2400+.

I searched a little and found out that ATI Radeon cards (I have a Radeon 9250) support all kinds of video acceleration like mpeg2 decoding and even adaptive deinterlacing.

I thought it'd be worth to give this a try. So I searched for DirectShow filters from ATI. I found them in the "ATI Multimedia Center" which you can download for free from their website.

Fact is this software is rather large. But you don't have to install it anyway. There's a library included called atimpenc.dll. You can just grab it and register it using

c:\windows\system32\regsvr32.exe atimpenc.dll

Next time you start graphedit.exe you find some more DirectShow filters from ATI. The interesting one for my project was of course the "ATI MPEG Video Decoder". You can just put that into your custom graph and use it in ProgDVB.

CPU usage dropped from ~50-60% to 10-20%. So I think this is a success. The picture looks not quite as good compared to dscaler, but almost. It's not bad.

Now, is there any way to use this in Linux?

Cheers

micmac

So no Linux support, eh? Ah well.

Thanks for your reply!

micmac