[mythtv-users] MPEG-4 Decoder hardware

[Kevin Kuphal]

Joseph A. Caputo wrote:

>On Saturday 05 June 2004 16:23, Kevin Kuphal wrote:
>  
>
>>Is there any known MPEG-4 decoder hardware that works with MythTV? 
>>I'm looking to build a frontend utilizing and old PIII-450 and my
>>main backend has a WinTV card that I record in RTJPEG on and
>>transcode much of it to MPEG-4 for storage.  I also have a large
>>number of Videos that I have encoded as MPEG-4 and I'd love to have a
>>frontend that could play this back using my existing hardware.   I've
>>come across some boards from Sigma Designs but didn't see much in the
>>way of Linux support nor could I tell that if it did have Linux
>>drivers if those would be enough to work with MythTV or if something
>>more was necessary.
>>    
>>
>
>Keep in mind that even if you did get a suitable HW MPEG-4 decoding 
>solution, it would likely have problems with Myth.  Myth uses an MPEG-4 
>video codec, but does not use an MPEG container format for it, nor does 
>it multiplex the audio and video streams.  Any HW MPEG-4 solution would 
>likely expect a compliant MPEG-4 stream.
>
>  
>
Thanks, I think I've settled on getting a GeForce MX 440 card with 
TV-out to power the box.  I've run a few MPEG-4 videos from my master 
backend now to this box and it seems fine with the P3-450 but the RTJPEG 
LiveTV encoding I use seems choppy.  I'm going to experiment with 
settings to see if I can work on that.  Worst case is I can spend $40 
and drop an 800mhz processor or something in there if I need a little 
speed boost but this will mostly be for playing back MPEG-4 content so 
it seems capable.  In the future if I upgrade my backend to use a 
PVR-250 I can take advantage of the GeForce MPEG-2 hardware decoding, yes?

Kevin