[mythtv-users] Mac Mini Video Acceleration Question (h.264)

[Brian Wood]

On Sunday 23 August 2009 16:00:59 Jarod Wilson wrote:

>
> Just bought an ion myself, they won't be obsoleted. In fact, you could
> actually use this *with* an ion system of the right type if you really
> wanted to. Not entirely possible to give a definitive answer on what
> kinds of systems *won't* be able to use this yet, as uptake will
> likely play a part in what form-factors the offering takes on...

Well I understand you can't get too detailed.

There are essentially two ways to play back video, the brute force software 
method or the specialized chip(s) hardware method.

Brute force chews up a lot of power, but is very flexible should new codecs 
come down the road.

Hardware playback (Sigma et al) is much more power efficient, but is cast in 
stone (well, silicon) as far as what it can do.

VDPAU is somewhat between the two extremes I guess. It depends on specialized 
hardware, but also software (drivers), so the load is split up.

What would be nice is some sort of "assistance" device, perhaps with some 
element of programmibility. Not a full-blown video card, but some sort of 
hardware that would "help out", perhaps done as a co-processor or 
pre-processor.

Before CPUs got fast enough to decode MPEG2, any machine that wanted to ;play 
back DVDs needed a hardware MPEG decoder, this stopped at about the 600 Mhz. 
PIII point. At that point economics took over, the manufacturers couldn't 
care less about power consumption (at that time), or consumption of CPU 
resources. They just wanted to erliminate that expensive MPEG decoder (not 
just "expensive"  in terms of cost, but space, power and heat, all major 
factors in a laptop design).

-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org