Hot on the tails of Plex, XBMC also gains hardware acceleration after Apple finally released their Video Decode Acceleration Framework Reference to third-party developers. This means Mac OS X 10.6.3 users can now offload all that video decoding to their GPU freeing up the CPU to do other things.

Here is a snippet of Team XBMC’s announcement:

We are very happy to announce that Apple’s new API (VDADecoder) for exposing GPU accelerated H.264 decoding under OSX 10.6.3 is present and fully functional in svn (r29729 and above) trunk builds of XBMC for Mac, and will appear in the next stable version. Now, non-CrystalHD equipped XBMC for Mac users that can enjoy the pure pleasure of accelerated H.264 decoding that was enjoyed by XBMC for Linux (VDPAU/VAAPI/CrystalHD) and XBMC for Windows (DXVA/CrystalHD) users. The VDADecoder API will handle all H.264 video content including that in m2ts containers. The last bit is very important as it means accelerated video decoding of decrypted Bluray m2ts files that are in H.264 format. Bluray can be one of three formats, VC1, MPEG-2 and H.264, with about 75 percent being in H.264 format. There is no word yet on accelerated VC1 decoding but since VDADecoder interfaces to low level Nvidia VP3 functions which can handle H.264 AND VC1/MPEG-2 content, we might see VC1/MPEG-2 support added to VDADecoder API at later date.

Also, while performance is fantastic with VDADecoder, there is still room for improvement. Running XBMC for Mac under Shark (Apple’s profiler) shows that about half of the CPU usage is now due to copying and converting the video frame from UYVY422 (VDADecoder’s native format) to YUV420P (XBMC’s internal format). Future work on the XBMC rendering path will allow passing decoded frames directly up to our renderer and thus skipping the copy/convert step. Stay tuned :)

Keep in mind that just like Plex this only applies to Macs equipped with a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M running OS X 10.6.3. Current supported models:

• MacBook (Aluminum) shipped between October, 2008 and June, 2009.
• MacBooks shipped after January 21st, 2009.
• Mac Minis shipped after March 3rd, 2009.
• MacBook Pros shipped after October 14th, 2008.
• iMacs which shipped after the first quarter of 2009.

As stated, to get this functionality right now, you need to get the svn (r29729 and above) trunk builds of XBMC for Mac. To do this run the # svn co http://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/trunk command. Or you can wait for the next stable version of XBMC to be released soon.

If you try out the new SVN please share your thoughts in the comments and questions in the community forums.

Thanks to the hard work of Ryan of the Plex team the latest Plex binary is now integrated with the VDA framework, providing high definition GPU decoding in Plex for devices with NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M. To reap the fruits of Ryan’s labor, just download the binary and install it into Plex.app/Contents/MacOS.

Download: Link
Source: Plex

ZOTAC released the world’s first NVIDIA ION upgrade kits today. Each kit consists of a ZOTAC small form factor (Mini-ITX or Mini-DTX)  motherboard and a PCI Express x1 ION graphics card.

At the time of this writing the following four kits are available: ZOTAC NM10-ITX (pictured), NM10-DTX, nForce 610i-ITX, or GeForce 6100-ITX. These translate to the NM10-A-E, NM10-B-E, NF610i-K-E, or GF6100-E-E motherboards.

An excerpt from the ZOTAC press release:

A ZOTAC ION graphics card with 16 unified shaders and 512MB of DDR3 memory empowers the ZOTAC ION Upgrade Kits with high-end features such as NVIDIA CUDA and PureVideo HD technologies, DirectX 10.1, DirectCompute, OpenGL and OpenCL compatibility for a high-performance and feature rich experience.

High definition digital content playback is where the ZOTAC ION Upgrade Kits shine, with hardware acceleration for many popular video formats such as AVC, VC-1, MPEG-4, DivX and many more. Adobe Flash Player 10.1 acceleration enables the ZOTAC ION Upgrade Kits to playback streaming high definition Internet video perfectly for flawless video and audio quality.

Other details provided:

ZOTAC ION graphics card

Engine Clock: 589 MHz

16 Unified Shaders

Shader Clock: 1402 MHz

512MB DDR3 memory

Memory Clock: 790 MHz

64-bit Memory interface

PCI Express x1

Low profile form factor

NVIDIA PureVideo HD technology

NVIDIA CUDA technology

HDMI, DVI & VGA outputs

HDMI 1.3a compliant

xvYCC Color and Deep Color support

HDCP compliant

Microsoft DirectCompute ready

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 decode acceleration

OpenCL compliant

Microsoft DirectX 10.1 with Shader Model 4.1 compatible

OpenGL 3.2 compatible

Microsoft Windows 7 with premium Aero user interface ready

ZOTAC ION Upgrade Kits includes ZOTAC NM10-A-E, NM10-B-E, NF610i-K-E, or GF6100-E-E platforms

No details on pricing are available at this time.