There's this thing called "other operating systems"... plus there are ways to allow running unsigned drivers in Win 7 64-bit (IIRC signed drivers aren't required in 32-bit, but it pops up a warning if you try to install one).
Actually, it's looking likely that the Greens will probably have enough seats in the Senate to hold the balance of power in their own right.
If you want to vote for progressive parties in the Senate without the hassle of voting below the line, I strongly suggest thinking about voting for the Australian Sex Party. Their preferences flow through a variety of progressive parties (who are unlikely to achieve a quota) before going to the Greens and then Labor.
Unlike many minor parties, the ASP don't seem to feel the need to have a policy on every issue. But I find that they don't have a policy I disagree with.
Remember - parties need to obtain 4% of the vote (I think) to get their deposit back - voting for a minor party can help them even if they don't get a seat.
At least I can watch free-to-air TV in Australia that is not limited to what is appropriate for a 12 year old. You can say "fuck" or show naked people (including nipples!) on FTA TV in Australia after 9:30pm. I'm pretty sure you could even get away with "cunt".
All countries have some fucked up stuff. The US allows all kinds of violence on FTA TV, but not a hint of sex, swearing or (god forbid) blaspheming. Australia doesn't have an 18+ rating for computer games, and has a government that wants to introduce ubiquitous high-speed broadband (yay!) and a very broad (and technically useless) internet filter (boo!).
Yeah - I know. Even something which didn't send him to jail would still probably remove him from the job. But I can dream that he suffer a punishment equivalent to treason for what he's trying to do to us.
You have no idea how much most Australians agree with you. Senator Kate Lundy, who is very technologically savvy, was the Shadow Communications and IT Minister for a while when Labor was in opposition, and did an excellent job. Unfortunately, Conroy is very politically savvy, so while Lundy was doing her job extremely competently, Conroy was making back-room deals that resulted in Lundy being kicked to the back benches and him taking her job with almost zero knowledge of the field.
The one single thing that Conroy has got right is the need for a high-bandwidth National Broadband Network. I have no idea how he latched onto that one, but I subscribe to the "stopped clock" theory.
The problem is that the other major party ("Liberal"/National coalition) is even worse - going more and more far right every day. They would not only keep the filter and data retention, but also stop rolling out the FTTP National Broadband Network. And bring back a whole raft of other policies that have previously been rejected but that they would then feel that they have a mandate for.
The only hope I see is:
1. Labor retains power in the lower house;
2. The Greens hold the balance of power in their own right in the upper house.
And even that is a slim hope that it will result in anything good coming out of this - the best we can hope for is that nothing particularly bad happens.
Oh - and:
3. Conroy gets caught doing something illegal enough (e.g. fucking a 12-year-old) to be forced to resign, and Kate Lundy gets appointed to be minister for IT & Communications.
6 pounds? What kind of tiny cats do you guys have? Now, if you'd said 5kg and 6kg I'd still think the cats were a little on the small side...
For the record, my smaller cat is 6.5kg (perfect weight for frame) and the larger is 8.2kg (just very slightly overweight - perfect weight would be about 7.8kg).
Actually, I've managed to achieve just under 900mbps actual throughput using my home network:
1. Intel gigabit NICs at each end (on mobo, no jumbo frames);
2. 3x 1.5TB drives in JBOD (no striping, hence single-drive performance, fully defragged) for reading;
3. G.Skill Falcon II 64GB SSD for writing;
4. Windows 7 (64-bit) at both ends;
5. ASUS GX1108N unmanaged gigabit 8-port switch;
6. Cat-6 cable (approx 20 metres between machines, switch about 2/3 of the way along).
The test was (IIRC) about 25GB of sequential data, and I tested using a stopwatch - I wasn't relying on what Windows was telling me. I only did the measurements because things were moving so much faster than expected (previously with older hardware and Windows XP I'd only been getting about 400mbps max throughput).
In synthetic tests, my hard drives gave 125MB/s (1gbps) sequential read speed, and my SSD gave 114MB/s (0.92gbps) sequential write speed.
So I'd say currently that consumer-level equipment is just about able to saturate gigabit ethernet once you take into account the TCP/IP overheads. It won't be long before consumer-level storage outstrips gigabit.
BTW, now that the system has been up and running for a couple of months, I find I normally get about 700mbps throughput.
Using CoreAVC (with CUDA for supported files) or ffdshow-tryouts (ffmpeg-mt) I haven't seen a single corrupted h.264 video recently. With CoreAVC (using CUDA), DxVA (for a much smaller group of supported files) or VDPAU, even Blu-Ray bitrate play back with absolutely minimal CPU usage (and with CoreAVC I can do post-processing afterwards). 720p versions of anime with softsubs in a Matroska container are vastly superior to similarly-sized XviD (usually 480p, sometimes 576p) with hardsubs in AVI.
CoreAVC versions prior to 2.0 had problems with some x264 settings (e.g. weightp=2) but those seem to be resolved.
I'm eager to see what Google does with On2, but for now h.264 is the "best" codec out there. There are definitely still uses for XviD (e.g. a lot of DVD players can play back XviD in AVI, but not h.264 or can't handle Matroska) but increasingly it is becoming an obsolete format.
And what relevance does that have to the OP's statement that "having more than 2G of RAM on a 32-bit OS is dumb"? BTW, PAE is used by default from XP SP2 (I think - it's required for DEP). How do you think I use my full 4GB with 32-bit Windows? Gavotte's RAM disk uses PAE to access the "lost" memory (several other RAM disks do the same thing).
This is another reason why having more than 2G of RAM on a 32-bit OS is dumb.
What are you smoking? Even on Windows 32-bit, without any modifications, the 2GB limit is per-application. I have yet to see a machine "lose" more than 1GB to address space (admittedly, no crossfire or SLI setups).
I have 4GB in my 32-bit development machine and regularly use it all. And I mean all - I use Gavotte's RAM Disk to create a 512MB RAM disk in the "unusable" portion that I use to hold my temp directory and other things I don't want to survive reboots. I've tried living in 2GB, and it's just not reasonable even with XP if you're forced to use Eclipse + JBoss...
Actually, I'm an Aussie who says "barbie", as does everyone I know. "Shrimp" OTOH is never used (and if I ever hear the term, I think of really tiny little prawns).
And additional important ruling (taken from the summary):
10. The first step in making a finding of authorisation was to determine whether certain iiNet users infringed copyright. I have found that they have. However, in reaching that finding, I have found that the number of infringements that have occurred are significantly fewer than the number alleged by the applicants. This follows from my finding that, on the evidence and on a proper interpretation of the law, a person makes each film available online only once through the BitTorrent system and electronically transmits each film only once through that system. This excludes the possible case of a person who might repeatedly download the same file, but no evidence was presented of such unusual and unlikely circumstance. Further, I have found, on the evidence before me, that the iiNet users have made one copy of each film and have not made further copies onto physical media such as DVDs.
This appears to be saying that when someone torrents, they only infringe copyright once. Which would make it economically unviable to go after people for casual copyright infringement via the internet, since damages would be severly limited.
Don't know where you got that idea from. In Australia we seem to be roughly 50/50 split among monarchists and those who don't want the British queen as our head of state. Probably not enough to pass a referendum (requires a majority in a majority of states) and the idea of a referendum was scuppered 10 years ago because it didn't have bipartisan support. Here we are 10 years later, and we've got another rabid monarchist/extreme conservative leading the "liberal" party (Tony Abbot aka "slime").
IMO it's in no way "patriotic" to listen to a speech from from someone who is almost entirely uninterested in this country, and whose speech almost certainly didn't mention this country (and if it did, did so in the context of the commonwealth). But I wouldn't know, as I'm an Australian who didn't listen to the speech (and nor did anyone else in my immediate family/circle of friends).
It's not just the average Mum or Dad. Sometimes us techies can't diagnose it's a problem with the hard disk either.
Case in point - my sister's computer (that I had built for her) was spontaneously crashing. The problem appeared to be a PSU issue (it had a 5-year-old 300W Antec PSU). Swapping out the PSU though didn't help - one (crappy) PSU it wouldn't post with, another it would spontaneously crash, etc.
I swapped out everything I had spares of, but couldn't diagnose the problem. Suspecting a motherboard problem, I eventually advised replacing the internals (they were starting to do things that would benefit from a CPU upgrade).
Several months later (after they'd moved house) their new machine started doing the same thing, and then started refusing to POST. Only three components had been transferred to the new machine - the case, the optical drive and the hard drive. Turns out that the hard drive spindle had become clogged with concrete dust (from their concrete floor) and was partially seizing up, making it use more and more voltage, and eventually tripping the hard drive. Finally it totally seized, causing the refusal to POST.
Never got the data from the hard drive, but their old machine is happily running as my test machine. I've even run an HD4870 in there (troubleshooting for a co-worker), off the old 300W PSU...
I've completed both Fallout 1&2 without my character directly killing anyone. I've also completed both using only unarmed combat. And I think I've managed to complete both by killing every single killable character in the game (hopefully I didn't miss any...).
Then again, I have completed both games over 40 times each.
There have been a lot of doubt as to whether BrokenCodes actually does have GPU acceleration on Windows working for XBMC (no code has been shown yet), although he's been talking the right talk in my limited DirectX/DxVA experience.
I think we can assume he's either telling the truth on both counts, or lying on both counts. If he's lying, status quo. If he's telling the truth, there's a small (IMO) chance of him releasing what he's done so far, but probably status quo.
Guild Wars is pay to purchase, but from then on it's free to play. Its graphics are astounding (better than WoW IMO - much less cartoony) and it supports huge numbers of players. It's got a huge amount of content - after 2 years of solid playing there's still lots that I haven't done yet.
I've got 3 accounts (mine, brother, mule - used to be 4, but I gave one to my nephew). The interesting thing with GW is that there is no significant advantage to buying additional stuff beyond the 3 campaigns (each standalone) and one expansion (which can be used with any of the campaigns). There are lots of things you can buy (extra character slots, extra account-wide storage, skill unlock packs, etc) but nothing that gives a significant advantage in the game - e.g. everything in the skill unlock packs can be unlocked by playing the PvE game, or doing well in PvP and using the points you get to unlock things.
Over the past 2 years we've gradually bought all the campaigns and expansions (most at sales, some full price) - all up, we've spent approx US$500 on the 4 accounts. ArenaNet has continually added new content and updates - enough that last night I finally bought the other 2 campaigns for my mule account.
GW has been more than worth the money I've paid - and maybe some day I'll buy some more character slots, etc.
Interestingly, if you install ffdshow-tryouts, its codecs are used except if there's already a Media Foundation codec installed for that media type (at least in Media Centre - don't know about WMP). So they're not "blocking" per-se - they're making Media Foundation codecs preferred over DirectShow codecs. I'm not sure exactly what MF codecs come with Windows 7, but I know that the ffdshow-tryouts XviD codec was used without any additional configuration.
If you install Haali's splitter, you can play back MKV in Media Centre.
Also interesting - even if you don't use the hack to make MF non-preferred, DirectShow filters will still be used e.g. VobSub.
Now, I think it's pretty scummy that MS has made MF codecs preferred over DirectShow, effectively blocking third-party codecs for that media type, but there's a lot of mis-information going around about what the situation actually is.
There are a couple of big advantages to CoreAVC's CUDA implementation that you may be unaware of:
1. It supports a wider range of h.264 files than MPC-HC, PowerDVD, etc with hardware offloading. In particular, it supports up to 16 reference frames. Now, in theory this shouldn't be an issue, because people should be encoding their files appropriately for use with DxVA, but many are not.
2. It allows post-processing of the video on the CPU. With DxVA, the codec has to connect directly to the renderer - MPC-HC allows some post-processing with shaders, but you're very limited. With CoreAVC, you can do whatever you like with the output before connecting it to the renderer - for example, doing post-processing with ffdshow-tryouts.
One area where CoreAVC shines is transcoding. Say you've got a quad-core machine, with an 8400GS (i.e. my server). Transcoding a Blu-Ray (crop black bars, apply higher compression with minimal reduction in quality) will happily use all 4 cores. Unfortunately, some of that time is being used to decode the original video. Use CoreAVC and nearly all the decoding is offloaded to the video card, meaning that your transcode will take less time.
I'm not going to address VDPAU, because my own experience of it (with XBMC) is mixed - it does an excellent job, except it won't display embedded subtitles from Matroska containers that use embedded fonts. Works fine with all the other renderers. Until that's fixed, it's a non-starter for me.
The only problem I have with CoreAVC is that I built my HTPC before CoreAVC with CUDA was released, and I've got an ATI card in it. It's not worthwhile changing my HTPC, and I'm hoping that eventually ATI cards will be supported (via OpenCL) at some time. In the meantime, MediaPortal is gaining the ability to display subtitles with DxVA (building on MPC-HC support) so for files that are usable with DxVA this will do the job.
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On further investigation, this is wrong - 32-bit requires signed drivers. But there are ways to get around it.
There's this thing called "other operating systems" ... plus there are ways to allow running unsigned drivers in Win 7 64-bit (IIRC signed drivers aren't required in 32-bit, but it pops up a warning if you try to install one).
Or maybe implement a "virtual display" driver that claims to support HDCP ...
Actually, it's looking likely that the Greens will probably have enough seats in the Senate to hold the balance of power in their own right.
If you want to vote for progressive parties in the Senate without the hassle of voting below the line, I strongly suggest thinking about voting for the Australian Sex Party. Their preferences flow through a variety of progressive parties (who are unlikely to achieve a quota) before going to the Greens and then Labor.
Unlike many minor parties, the ASP don't seem to feel the need to have a policy on every issue. But I find that they don't have a policy I disagree with.
http://www.sexparty.org.au/index.php
http://www.sexparty.org.au/index.php/policies
Remember - parties need to obtain 4% of the vote (I think) to get their deposit back - voting for a minor party can help them even if they don't get a seat.
At least I can watch free-to-air TV in Australia that is not limited to what is appropriate for a 12 year old. You can say "fuck" or show naked people (including nipples!) on FTA TV in Australia after 9:30pm. I'm pretty sure you could even get away with "cunt".
All countries have some fucked up stuff. The US allows all kinds of violence on FTA TV, but not a hint of sex, swearing or (god forbid) blaspheming. Australia doesn't have an 18+ rating for computer games, and has a government that wants to introduce ubiquitous high-speed broadband (yay!) and a very broad (and technically useless) internet filter (boo!).
Yeah - I know. Even something which didn't send him to jail would still probably remove him from the job. But I can dream that he suffer a punishment equivalent to treason for what he's trying to do to us.
You have no idea how much most Australians agree with you. Senator Kate Lundy, who is very technologically savvy, was the Shadow Communications and IT Minister for a while when Labor was in opposition, and did an excellent job. Unfortunately, Conroy is very politically savvy, so while Lundy was doing her job extremely competently, Conroy was making back-room deals that resulted in Lundy being kicked to the back benches and him taking her job with almost zero knowledge of the field.
The one single thing that Conroy has got right is the need for a high-bandwidth National Broadband Network. I have no idea how he latched onto that one, but I subscribe to the "stopped clock" theory.
The problem is that the other major party ("Liberal"/National coalition) is even worse - going more and more far right every day. They would not only keep the filter and data retention, but also stop rolling out the FTTP National Broadband Network. And bring back a whole raft of other policies that have previously been rejected but that they would then feel that they have a mandate for.
The only hope I see is:
1. Labor retains power in the lower house;
2. The Greens hold the balance of power in their own right in the upper house.
And even that is a slim hope that it will result in anything good coming out of this - the best we can hope for is that nothing particularly bad happens.
Oh - and:
3. Conroy gets caught doing something illegal enough (e.g. fucking a 12-year-old) to be forced to resign, and Kate Lundy gets appointed to be minister for IT & Communications.
6 pounds? What kind of tiny cats do you guys have? Now, if you'd said 5kg and 6kg I'd still think the cats were a little on the small side ...
For the record, my smaller cat is 6.5kg (perfect weight for frame) and the larger is 8.2kg (just very slightly overweight - perfect weight would be about 7.8kg).
Seems a number of domains/hostnames are returning 127.0.0.1 - two that I tried are openbittorrent.com and tracker.thepiratebay.org).
I hope the registrars will be refunding the registration fees for these domains. And that they be sued for breach of contract.
Actually, I've managed to achieve just under 900mbps actual throughput using my home network:
1. Intel gigabit NICs at each end (on mobo, no jumbo frames);
2. 3x 1.5TB drives in JBOD (no striping, hence single-drive performance, fully defragged) for reading;
3. G.Skill Falcon II 64GB SSD for writing;
4. Windows 7 (64-bit) at both ends;
5. ASUS GX1108N unmanaged gigabit 8-port switch;
6. Cat-6 cable (approx 20 metres between machines, switch about 2/3 of the way along).
The test was (IIRC) about 25GB of sequential data, and I tested using a stopwatch - I wasn't relying on what Windows was telling me. I only did the measurements because things were moving so much faster than expected (previously with older hardware and Windows XP I'd only been getting about 400mbps max throughput).
In synthetic tests, my hard drives gave 125MB/s (1gbps) sequential read speed, and my SSD gave 114MB/s (0.92gbps) sequential write speed.
So I'd say currently that consumer-level equipment is just about able to saturate gigabit ethernet once you take into account the TCP/IP overheads. It won't be long before consumer-level storage outstrips gigabit.
BTW, now that the system has been up and running for a couple of months, I find I normally get about 700mbps throughput.
Using CoreAVC (with CUDA for supported files) or ffdshow-tryouts (ffmpeg-mt) I haven't seen a single corrupted h.264 video recently. With CoreAVC (using CUDA), DxVA (for a much smaller group of supported files) or VDPAU, even Blu-Ray bitrate play back with absolutely minimal CPU usage (and with CoreAVC I can do post-processing afterwards). 720p versions of anime with softsubs in a Matroska container are vastly superior to similarly-sized XviD (usually 480p, sometimes 576p) with hardsubs in AVI.
CoreAVC versions prior to 2.0 had problems with some x264 settings (e.g. weightp=2) but those seem to be resolved.
I'm eager to see what Google does with On2, but for now h.264 is the "best" codec out there. There are definitely still uses for XviD (e.g. a lot of DVD players can play back XviD in AVI, but not h.264 or can't handle Matroska) but increasingly it is becoming an obsolete format.
And what relevance does that have to the OP's statement that "having more than 2G of RAM on a 32-bit OS is dumb"? BTW, PAE is used by default from XP SP2 (I think - it's required for DEP). How do you think I use my full 4GB with 32-bit Windows? Gavotte's RAM disk uses PAE to access the "lost" memory (several other RAM disks do the same thing).
Or perhaps he was comparing proficiency at second languages ... (english as a second language vs spanish as a second language).
What are you smoking? Even on Windows 32-bit, without any modifications, the 2GB limit is per-application. I have yet to see a machine "lose" more than 1GB to address space (admittedly, no crossfire or SLI setups).
I have 4GB in my 32-bit development machine and regularly use it all. And I mean all - I use Gavotte's RAM Disk to create a 512MB RAM disk in the "unusable" portion that I use to hold my temp directory and other things I don't want to survive reboots. I've tried living in 2GB, and it's just not reasonable even with XP if you're forced to use Eclipse + JBoss ...
Actually, I'm an Aussie who says "barbie", as does everyone I know. "Shrimp" OTOH is never used (and if I ever hear the term, I think of really tiny little prawns).
And additional important ruling (taken from the summary):
This appears to be saying that when someone torrents, they only infringe copyright once. Which would make it economically unviable to go after people for casual copyright infringement via the internet, since damages would be severly limited.
Don't know where you got that idea from. In Australia we seem to be roughly 50/50 split among monarchists and those who don't want the British queen as our head of state. Probably not enough to pass a referendum (requires a majority in a majority of states) and the idea of a referendum was scuppered 10 years ago because it didn't have bipartisan support. Here we are 10 years later, and we've got another rabid monarchist/extreme conservative leading the "liberal" party (Tony Abbot aka "slime").
IMO it's in no way "patriotic" to listen to a speech from from someone who is almost entirely uninterested in this country, and whose speech almost certainly didn't mention this country (and if it did, did so in the context of the commonwealth). But I wouldn't know, as I'm an Australian who didn't listen to the speech (and nor did anyone else in my immediate family/circle of friends).
It's not just the average Mum or Dad. Sometimes us techies can't diagnose it's a problem with the hard disk either.
Case in point - my sister's computer (that I had built for her) was spontaneously crashing. The problem appeared to be a PSU issue (it had a 5-year-old 300W Antec PSU). Swapping out the PSU though didn't help - one (crappy) PSU it wouldn't post with, another it would spontaneously crash, etc.
I swapped out everything I had spares of, but couldn't diagnose the problem. Suspecting a motherboard problem, I eventually advised replacing the internals (they were starting to do things that would benefit from a CPU upgrade).
Several months later (after they'd moved house) their new machine started doing the same thing, and then started refusing to POST. Only three components had been transferred to the new machine - the case, the optical drive and the hard drive. Turns out that the hard drive spindle had become clogged with concrete dust (from their concrete floor) and was partially seizing up, making it use more and more voltage, and eventually tripping the hard drive. Finally it totally seized, causing the refusal to POST.
Never got the data from the hard drive, but their old machine is happily running as my test machine. I've even run an HD4870 in there (troubleshooting for a co-worker), off the old 300W PSU ...
I've completed both Fallout 1&2 without my character directly killing anyone. I've also completed both using only unarmed combat. And I think I've managed to complete both by killing every single killable character in the game (hopefully I didn't miss any ...).
Then again, I have completed both games over 40 times each.
I haven't completed FO3, and doubt I ever will.
The 3-machine family pack looks like it will be a better deal, even for 2 computers. Of course, in my case I have 4 ...
BrokenCodes, who claims he's been working on Windows GPU acceleration for XBMC, has claimed that he's one of the three people.
http://www.xbmc.org/forum/showpost.php?p=369624&postcount=210
There have been a lot of doubt as to whether BrokenCodes actually does have GPU acceleration on Windows working for XBMC (no code has been shown yet), although he's been talking the right talk in my limited DirectX/DxVA experience.
I think we can assume he's either telling the truth on both counts, or lying on both counts. If he's lying, status quo. If he's telling the truth, there's a small (IMO) chance of him releasing what he's done so far, but probably status quo.
Guild Wars is pay to purchase, but from then on it's free to play. Its graphics are astounding (better than WoW IMO - much less cartoony) and it supports huge numbers of players. It's got a huge amount of content - after 2 years of solid playing there's still lots that I haven't done yet.
I've got 3 accounts (mine, brother, mule - used to be 4, but I gave one to my nephew). The interesting thing with GW is that there is no significant advantage to buying additional stuff beyond the 3 campaigns (each standalone) and one expansion (which can be used with any of the campaigns). There are lots of things you can buy (extra character slots, extra account-wide storage, skill unlock packs, etc) but nothing that gives a significant advantage in the game - e.g. everything in the skill unlock packs can be unlocked by playing the PvE game, or doing well in PvP and using the points you get to unlock things.
Over the past 2 years we've gradually bought all the campaigns and expansions (most at sales, some full price) - all up, we've spent approx US$500 on the 4 accounts. ArenaNet has continually added new content and updates - enough that last night I finally bought the other 2 campaigns for my mule account.
GW has been more than worth the money I've paid - and maybe some day I'll buy some more character slots, etc.
Interestingly, if you install ffdshow-tryouts, its codecs are used except if there's already a Media Foundation codec installed for that media type (at least in Media Centre - don't know about WMP). So they're not "blocking" per-se - they're making Media Foundation codecs preferred over DirectShow codecs. I'm not sure exactly what MF codecs come with Windows 7, but I know that the ffdshow-tryouts XviD codec was used without any additional configuration.
If you install Haali's splitter, you can play back MKV in Media Centre.
Also interesting - even if you don't use the hack to make MF non-preferred, DirectShow filters will still be used e.g. VobSub.
Now, I think it's pretty scummy that MS has made MF codecs preferred over DirectShow, effectively blocking third-party codecs for that media type, but there's a lot of mis-information going around about what the situation actually is.
There are a couple of big advantages to CoreAVC's CUDA implementation that you may be unaware of:
1. It supports a wider range of h.264 files than MPC-HC, PowerDVD, etc with hardware offloading. In particular, it supports up to 16 reference frames. Now, in theory this shouldn't be an issue, because people should be encoding their files appropriately for use with DxVA, but many are not.
2. It allows post-processing of the video on the CPU. With DxVA, the codec has to connect directly to the renderer - MPC-HC allows some post-processing with shaders, but you're very limited. With CoreAVC, you can do whatever you like with the output before connecting it to the renderer - for example, doing post-processing with ffdshow-tryouts.
One area where CoreAVC shines is transcoding. Say you've got a quad-core machine, with an 8400GS (i.e. my server). Transcoding a Blu-Ray (crop black bars, apply higher compression with minimal reduction in quality) will happily use all 4 cores. Unfortunately, some of that time is being used to decode the original video. Use CoreAVC and nearly all the decoding is offloaded to the video card, meaning that your transcode will take less time.
I'm not going to address VDPAU, because my own experience of it (with XBMC) is mixed - it does an excellent job, except it won't display embedded subtitles from Matroska containers that use embedded fonts. Works fine with all the other renderers. Until that's fixed, it's a non-starter for me.
The only problem I have with CoreAVC is that I built my HTPC before CoreAVC with CUDA was released, and I've got an ATI card in it. It's not worthwhile changing my HTPC, and I'm hoping that eventually ATI cards will be supported (via OpenCL) at some time. In the meantime, MediaPortal is gaining the ability to display subtitles with DxVA (building on MPC-HC support) so for files that are usable with DxVA this will do the job.