x1300 h.264 decode accel

[Essence_of_War]

I have an older thinkpad (ibm T60) with ATI x1300 graphics

I've read here:
http://www.anandtech.com/print/1897/

Radeon X1300 owners will be able to get hardware acceleration at up to 480p, X1600 owners get it for 720p, and X1800 owners get full acceleration at up to 1080p. ATI did mention that they are working on bringing those limits down, but that is a time intensive driver and algorithm optimization process that may or may not happen.

That the x1300 (desktop, I think?) supports hardware decode of h.264 up to 720x480. Is that true also for the mobile? Do I need any special drivers to enable it in Ubuntu 12.04 other than the FOSS ones?

 

[ViRGE]

I would be surprised if this feature even worked in modern drivers. Neither AMD nor NVIDIA's pre-2007 cards had a full H.264 decoder, and at least on Windows no modern media player is capable of taking advantage of their meager offload capabilities.

 

[sheh]

It doesn't have to be full decoding to help. Nvidia has had some H264 decoding since the 6000 series in 2004.

Anyway, in the case of ATI/AMD, just try. The Wikipedia article suggests more serious decoding is present since the Radeon 2xxx series, but there may be some decoding in the generation before:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder#Linux

 

[Essence_of_War]

Thanks for weighing in, ViRGE. I was not too optimistic about this, if the x1300 desktop gpu could barely do h264 decode at 720x480, I would have been a little surprised if the mobile version could do anything like that.