VC1, H.264, HD-DVD, Blu-ray and hardware acceleration questions

[caboosemoose]

Hi folks, I've neglected to pay close enough attention to these issues and am in need of a quick referesher. If anyone can point me in the right direction with the following queries I'd be most humbly grateful.

1. Do NVIDIA and ATI offer hardware VC-1 acceleration on any of their GPUs?

2. Is hardware VC-1 acceleration a separate issue from WMV9 acceleration (I believe the VC-1 codec is based on WMV9)?

2. What's the best/easiest application to compare H.264 hardware acceleration on ATI and NVIDIA GPUs?

3. I believe PowerDVD 7 supports HD-DVD playback.
a. Is this correct?
b. Does it also support Blu-ray?
c. If VC-1 acceleration is available on any ATI or NV GPUs, can PowerDVD hook in?

4. If PowerDVD does not support Blu-ray, is there a software app that does and is there one that supports both formats?

Thanks again for any help.

[pcchen]

I tried decoding a VC-1 file with a GeForce 6600 PCIe card, and it does not use hardware acceleration (the driver version is 91.31) as the output type is plain YV12.

[Malo]

Wouldn't the format of the Disc be independant of powerDVD decoding the HD codecs? As long as PowerDVD understands the format of the files on the disc, as long as windows can read the disc you should be fine.

PowerDVD site, HD codec support:

http://www.cyberlink.com/english/products/powerdvd/7/multimedia.jsp

[ERP]

Well if your talking about playing actual HDDVD's or BluRay discs it's going to have to deal with all the other crap that can be interleaved with the streams (even if it just ignores it). PIP streams and the interactive crap for the menus.

[pcchen]

And, of course, the encryptions :)