[mythtv-users] What would be the best route to go?

Mike Hicks hick0088 at tc.umn.edu
Wed Sep 17 22:22:22 EDT 2003


On Wed, 2003-09-17 at 20:26, MegaDeTH wrote:
> > I'm running a 1700 with no problems, though I'm told it currently isn't 
> > quite enough oomph for software HDTV decoding.
> 
> For real?  I'm running 700mhz celron xbox's as frontends, decoding 
> 702x480 mpeg2 or mpeg4 is no problem, how much harder is HDTV decoding? 
>   I didnt think it was that much worse than 702x480 mpeg2!

Well, the bitrate is much higher for HDTV.  I've heard most people say
that it runs up to about 20 Mbit/s (though some people say it's twice
that).  HDTV display resolutions are also significantly greater,
1280x720 or 1920x1080.  Some video is also 60 FPS, twice the framerate
of NTSC video.  Conversely, some stuff is only 24 FPS, but I don't know
how common that is.

It has been said that people who have video cards that support XvMC
(X11's "motion compensation" system) are able to offload enough of the
video processing of the video stream to get a 1.4GHz or lower system to
handle the stream, but only nVidia cards (with binary drivers) support
that in HDTV resolution, as far as I know.

Some other graphics adapters support XvMC, but I don't know if they can
do high resolution or not (VIA's integrated video on their EPIA-M
boards, and Intel's i810 graphics).  I think that they are all
binary-only drivers, except perhaps the i810 one...

-- 
 _  _  _  _ _  ___    _ _  _  ___ _ _  __   "Every time I've built
/ \/ \(_)| ' // ._\  / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__   character, I've regretted
\_||_/|_||_|_\\___/  \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __)  it."
[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]
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