With the number of recordings many of us are capturing for our eventual watching pleasure, archival to DVD and (S)VCD becomes increasingly important. Many people run out of drive space far too quickly, and others of us like to archive some of our favourite shows for future watching.
To accomplish this, we generally use nuvexport to convert the recordings from MythTV into XviD AVI, SVCD, VCD or DVD video files. At this point, nuvexport uses transcode to do most of the conversions. The problem with that is that transcode doesn't win any awards for being blazingly fast. It can often take 3-4h to transcode a 1h show on a fairly fast machine (AMD Athlon XP 2200+). This is suboptimal.
I got to thinking about the GPU in the video cards, and how they have an impressive amount of processing power. At about that time, I found the Openvidia project, and got somewhat inspired. It seems it is potentially possible to do some of the transcoding functionality in the GPU of Nvidia GeForce (and maybe later the ATI Radeon) chipset cards. The trick will be to somehow port the transcoding algorithms to work in the vector and shading portions of the GPU.
That will be an exercise for later of course. Got too many other things on the go right now. However, I have 2 PCI Geforce4 MX440 cards in my development PVR machine for this purpose. I'll get to it eventually.