On Jan 12, 2005, at 11:03 AM, Bill Rising wrote: > True enough, but it might be a lot less complicated and a lot less > time consuming than building your own (as you already did). Of course, > is there really a need to have that fast a processor in a Tivo? Then > again, if it had a wireless card and bluetooth in it, it could be used > to work on another networked computer while sitting in front of the > TV.
Those DVRs such as the Tivo can get away with cheap, slow processors because they put the video encoding and decoding onto custom cards. That's what I did in my MythTV by using a PVR-350 tuner card; it handles MPEG2 on the fly while hardly bothering the processor at all. I think the cute little Mac might be right on the edge of what it can do, if you feed it an MPEG2 stream for HDTV. It doesn't have any expansion slots to add a fancy coprocessor card. On the other hand, the G4 does have those AltiVec capabilities that speed up MP3 stuff an awful lot. This could be a whole market for Apple. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be January 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
