[mythtv-users] Interesting Cringely article on possible Apple PVRs

matthew.garman at gmail.com matthew.garman at gmail.com
Fri Mar 9 23:52:20 UTC 2007


On Fri, Mar 09, 2007 at 03:08:04PM -0800, Yeechang Lee wrote:
> Nick Morrott <knowledgejunkie at gmail.com> says:
> > http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070308_001806.html
> 
> That said, I am intrigued by the notion of a $50 super
> MPEG4-encoder/decoder chip. Presumably, such a beast would be a
> step above what's in the garden-variety standard-definition so
> popular amongst MythTV users, right?[1] In other words, could it
> encode HDTV resolutions in realtime?

That would be *awesome*, assuming it had good drivers for Linux.  On
my dual-core Athlon64 3800+ (overclocked 10%), it takes about 10
hours to encode a typical movie (from DVD) with x264 (open source
H.264 implementation).  Granted, that's with very high quality
options---but it's 10 hours!

Even now I'm considering spending upwards of $1k to build a new Core
2 Duo machine for what I expect to be only a 33% performance
increase.  I'd pay $50 without blinking an eye for realtime!

-Matt



More information about the mythtv-users mailing list