Sorry for the unorthodox post, however this just caught my eye!<br><br><a href="http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/21/fujitsus-h-264-chip-encodes-decodes-in-full-hd-a-worlds-fir/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/21/fujitsus-h-264-chip-encodes-decodes-in-full-hd-a-worlds-fir/
</a><br><br>Text from article: Fujitsu just announced a world's first H.264 chip capable of
encoding/decoding 1920 x 1080 (60i/50i) video in real time. The chip
features 256MB of onboard FCRAM and ultra low 750mW power draw when
encoding video. That means lickity quick, MPEG-2 quality processing
with only a third, or half the required storage. The ¥30,000 ($247)
MB86H51 chip is available to OEMs starting July 1st after which you'll
find it bunged into the latest up-scale, consumer-class video
recorders.<br><br>Now someone just needs to create a USB interface, and with a little MythTV coding, I'm sure we could get hardware h.264 playback and encoding. Could be useful for us UK guys in the future (out HD is
h.264). $247 is quite steep though, and it can only process one stream at a time, however for encoding (at least), it could dramatically decrease the time taken to transcode to h.264, as well as the storage required.<br>
<br>Just raising people's awarness...<br><br>James Buckley<br>