On Mon, 2003-07-21 at 02:36, Matthew S. Hallacy wrote: > > Someday, when processors are running in the tens of gigahertz, dedicated > > hardware won't be needed because the GNU Radio project will then be able > > to decode the various modulation schemes in realtime. But, that's quite > > a while off.. > > My P233MMX can decode a 16mbit MPEG-2 stream under linux, no need for > any terribly high end hardware. MythTV requires more power because it's > time shifting, so it's reading from the tuner device, encoding to mjpeg > or divx (if it's not from a hardware encoder), and writing out to a ring > buffer while another thread is reading off that same ringbuffer, decoding > it, then sending it to the video card. Er, well, I was referring to the difficulty of demodulating digital transmissions in 8VSB, QAM64, QAM128, etc., which is an entirely different problem. If MPEG2 decoding has gotten so good, I'm pretty amazed -- one of the big reasons I had for upgrading to my 1.3GHz system (which was pretty top-of-the-line at the time) was because I couldn't adequately play movies on my 350 MHz AMD K6-2 (but it's entirely possible that the Pentium chip could outperform the my old AMD chip if floating-point decoding is used..) > Eventually the ITVC15 MPEG-1/2 decoder on the WinTV PVR will be hashed out, > and MythTV will be able to use it for video output, this will further lower > the amount of CPU required for a decent PVR. Definitely. A user with that setup would have something very much like a real TiVo, and I recall that they have processors in the range of 50-150 MHz (maybe a little faster). Of course, this also means that CPU power for doing anything else is pretty limited, and decoding most non-MPEG1/2 material would probably be difficult. -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ I saw a subliminal / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ advertising executive, but \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) only for a second. [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20030721/84f25c7c/attachment.pgp