No MPEG-2 hardware acceleration w/ GeForce 4 MX?!

[Awatef]

I've got this GeForce 4 MX 4000 card, and under PowerDVD 5, enabling "Hardware Acceleration" lowers the CPU load by 3% only (from 19 down to 16 on a Celeron-D 2.4GHz).
I'm wondering if this is normal... Has anybody with a similiar card experience the same thing?

PS: Latest driver is installed (93.71)

[jffulcrum]

GeForce 4 MX support only deinterlacing and colour-space conversion via DXVA. Purchase NVIDIA PureVideo Decoder stuff and use them in DVD players to got idct and, maybe, motion-compensation and 3-2 pulldown acceleration.

[Awatef]

Hmm... I got that purevideo decoder, but it doesn't seem to have any effect on PowerDVD?!

[Leak]

GeForce 4 MX support only deinterlacing and colour-space conversion via DXVA. Purchase NVIDIA PureVideo Decoder stuff and use them in DVD players to got idct and, maybe, motion-compensation and 3-2 pulldown acceleration.
I'm afraid none of that will help, as a Geforce 4 MX is actually a slightly beefed up Geforce 2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geforce_4_mx#GeForce4_MX), and those clunkers will never do any video decoding acceleration in hardware...

np: Jimi Tenor & Kabu Kabu - Bedroom Eyes (Joystone)

[jffulcrum]

Awatef
I got that purevideo decoder, but it doesn't seem to have any effect on PowerDVD
Maybe PowerDVD continue use his own decoder. Try with Windows Media Player (remember to check which decoder selected in their properties on DVD page).

Leak
4MX has even better decoding capabilities then 4 Ti GPU`s. IDCT & MC featured for 4MX in Linux NVIDIA driver.

[foxyshadis]

I'm afraid none of that will help, as a Geforce 4 MX is actually a slightly beefed up Geforce 2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geforce_4_mx#GeForce4_MX), and those clunkers will never do any video decoding acceleration in hardware...

np: Jimi Tenor & Kabu Kabu - Bedroom Eyes (Joystone)

Interestingly, according to the last paragraph,
In motion-video applications, the GeForce4 MX did offer new functionality. The GeForce4 MX (and not the GeForce4 Ti) was the first GeForce member to feature the VPE (video processing engine.) The GeForce4 MX was the first GeForce to offer hardware-iDCT and VLC (variable length code) decoding, making VPE a major upgrade from NVIDIA’s previous HDVP. In the application of MPEG-2 playback, VPE could finally compete head-to-head with ATI's outstanding video-engine.
But this should be understood to be separate from DXVA. Whatever hardware capabilities were present in card before DirectX9c have long since been deprecated and probably removed from drivers in favor of DXVA. Unless you have an old version of the software that came with a custom card interface driver, you'll probably not get acceleration working in windows.

[burfadel]

Use the latest graphics drivers. Before people have my neck, you can use the 158.24 etc on the Geforce 4 mx series, actually on all Geforce cards! You just need to modify the inf (text) file to have the model information and driver reference.

You can download them here:
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/drivers/

The website crashed and they're still rebuilding it, so the very latest driver for XP (158.24) isn't listed. 165.01 is, and you can try that if you like but there are a few problems with it! I suggest you just download the inf file by clicking on 'inf', then download the 158.24 graphics driver for the Geforce 8600 from the Nvidia site. Extract out the file using winrar, and replace the inf file that came with the drive with the one you downloaded. The inf for 158.24 is the same as for 158.19 except the line of text saying the version number. There is no operational difference between the two inf files. You can edit the inf file and change the .19 to .24 if you like. When you update nvidia drivers, it always have problems with replacing files already in use, so install the standard vga driver through control panel, restart, then run the driver setup. You will now have a MUCH MUCH later driver installed and despite what some people claim it does help older cards!