[mythtv-users] H'ware playback, was:Myth on WD HDTV Media Player for $99

[Brian Wood]

On Tuesday 13 October 2009 12:32:39 Johnny wrote:
> > CPU power does help.  But the idea is to have a fanless, silent FE,
> > not throw h/w at the problem.
>
> Not to throw general purpose hardware at it (e.g. powerful CPUs or
> GPUs), but throwing specialized hardware (like the specialized decoder
> chips metioned previously) is what gets you a low power, silent, cheap
> frontend.

Dedicated special purpose hardware is generally more efficient than using general purpose gear.

When DVD drives first became available Dell put hardware MPEG decoders in their laptops, they weren't able to decode MPEG2 with software until the CPUs (PIII Coppermines at the time) hit 600 Mhz.

Of course that was with highly optimized (Windows) drivers. 

My situation is I have a lot of older but high-power hardware (like AMD FX60 systems and multi-Opteron bopards), I'd rather re-purpose that instead of buying new stuff, even though it's not as efficient as it might be.

But when we get to differences in performance the situation changes, if I can get better performance from dedicated decoding hardware I'll go that route. By "performance" I mean a lack of noticeable artifacts in the playback, not overall power efficiency.

Sooner or later my local broadcaster will get a better encoder that can do the advanced flags, and I suppose I need to be ready, if I live that long :-)

-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org
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