[mythtv-users] Possibly a "dumb" question

[Daniel Kristjansson]

On Fri, 2010-02-05 at 11:05 -0500, Raymond Wagner wrote:
> Understand, however, that encoding HD MPEG2 is NOT TRIVIAL.  If you did 
> manage to get such a thing rigged up and working, you would still need a 
> massive amount of power to re-encode in real time to render the menus 
> and OSD.

I remember when I needed to tweak the compiler flags on MythTV just
to get it to handle 1080i MPEG-2 decoding on a P4 2.8Ghz, but now...

One i5 core and 320 MB is all I need for MPEG-2 encoding, two cores
and 600MB if I want scaling and OSD. Maybe not trivial, but not
exactly putting a man-on-the-moon. MPEG-2 Encoding is more processor
intensive than decoding. But, modern processors are amazingly fast.
The problem is that now that MPEG-2 is easy, everyone is moving to
h.264 (aka MPEG-4 AVC).

-- Daniel