[mythtv-users] MPEG-4 Decoder hardware

[Joseph A. Caputo]

On Monday 07 June 2004 12:06, Kevin Kuphal wrote:
> Joseph A. Caputo wrote:
> >On Saturday 05 June 2004 16:23, Kevin Kuphal wrote:
> >>Is there any known MPEG-4 decoder hardware that works with MythTV?
> >>I'm looking to build a frontend utilizing and old PIII-450 and my
> >>main backend has a WinTV card that I record in RTJPEG on and
> >>transcode much of it to MPEG-4 for storage.  I also have a large
> >>number of Videos that I have encoded as MPEG-4 and I'd love to have
> >> a frontend that could play this back using my existing hardware.  
> >> I've come across some boards from Sigma Designs but didn't see
> >> much in the way of Linux support nor could I tell that if it did
> >> have Linux drivers if those would be enough to work with MythTV or
> >> if something more was necessary.
> >
> >Keep in mind that even if you did get a suitable HW MPEG-4 decoding
> >solution, it would likely have problems with Myth.  Myth uses an
> > MPEG-4 video codec, but does not use an MPEG container format for
> > it, nor does it multiplex the audio and video streams.  Any HW
> > MPEG-4 solution would likely expect a compliant MPEG-4 stream.
>
> Thanks, I think I've settled on getting a GeForce MX 440 card with
> TV-out to power the box.  I've run a few MPEG-4 videos from my master
> backend now to this box and it seems fine with the P3-450 but the
> RTJPEG LiveTV encoding I use seems choppy.  I'm going to experiment
> with settings to see if I can work on that.  Worst case is I can
> spend $40 and drop an 800mhz processor or something in there if I
> need a little speed boost but this will mostly be for playing back
> MPEG-4 content so it seems capable.  In the future if I upgrade my
> backend to use a PVR-250 I can take advantage of the GeForce MPEG-2
> hardware decoding, yes?

AFAIK, yes.

-JAC