[mythtv-users] HDTV questions

Keith C mythtv at keithandjill.com
Mon Dec 12 23:17:03 EST 2005


On Dec 12, 2005, at 8:20 PM, Steve Adeff wrote:

> On Monday 12 December 2005 19:41, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>> Todd Ignasiak wrote:
>>> In the U.S., HDTV is broadcast as MPEG2.  The articles I have read
>>> about HDTV in Europe have said MPEG4 (probably H.264 / MPEG4.10 /  
>>> AVC)
>>> will be used.  H.264 takes much more CPU horsepower to decode.   A
>>> 3GHz P4 may not ave the horsepower to decode it.
>>
>> An AMD Athlon X2 4800+ won't decode 1080i60 H.264.  :)
>>
>> Mike
>
> WOW! thats serious decoding requirements. So basically H.264 is  
> going to
> require a dedicated DSP?
>

It will probably require some hand tuned vector code (SSE3, Altivec,  
etc) to make it work.  Or to have your graphics card do it for you.   
The graphics card solution is probably going to be slow to come to  
linux.  Hand tuned code is more likely, but takes some real  
professionals to implement.  For what its worth, my old 1.4 Ghz Mac  
G4 does a decent job of smaller screen sizes because of the work  
Apple did hand coding for the Altivec unit.

For now, I probably wouldn't recommend it for Linux, especially with  
HDs being so cheap (H.264 is basically trading processor for space/ 
bandwidth).

Keith C


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list