[mythtv-users] HDMI capture card with linux drivers

[Raymond Wagner]

On 4/16/2010 00:07, Yeechang Lee wrote:
> Raymond Wagner<raymond at wagnerrp.com>  says:
>    
>> Their software... meaning it has nothing to do with the hardware or
>> the drivers.
>>      
> That's can't be right; my understanding is that it's impossible for a
> general-purpose consumer-priced computer today to real-time encode HD
> video into high-quality h.264. (Otherwise someone by now would've
> written such an encoder and turn any simple hardware framegrabber into
> a HD-PVR equivalent.) Or am I mistaken?
>    

I'm saying it is their software that captures to MJPEG, not the 
hardware, not the linux drivers.  If MythTV were to support this device, 
it would use its own encoding mechanism, be that RTJPEG, MPEG4, H264, or 
whatever.  VDPAU support would not factor into the equation, since the 
fact that the Windows software uses MJPEG has no bearing what-so-ever on 
what MythTV would do.

Furthermore, compression is almost always asymmetric, with compression 
taking far longer than decompression.  Any machine capable of capturing 
and compressing such video would easily be able to decompress it later.  
Hardware acceleration would not be necessary.