On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 05:14:11PM -0500, john roberts wrote: > > Has anyone gotten the Mini-mac to work as a frontend with ATSC content? > > I was reading the threads from last month and there was some question as to > the CPU having enough to do smooth playback. > > Anyone?
I was speaking with the elgato folks who were demoing their eyetv HDTV PVR at our reception on Tuesday. The "HD" they demo was 960x540p -- ie. 1/4 resolution, effectively. They generally feel you need a dual G5 to decode full 1080i. A single won't do it. No way for an imac mini -- unless some day Apple releases APIs to control the mpeg decoder inside it. But they have not been forthcoming. An the other hand, it was interesting that they were able to write a special codec that could play 1080i at 960x540p resolution with the limited CPU available. It means if somebody wanted to be a busy beaver they might also be able to write such a codec for linux that could let people play HDTV files, at this lower res (just fine for EDTVs) on lower powered CPUs without need for pre-transcode. The codec of course has to decode the full stream. They said the main thing was simply not having to deal with the memory bandwidth required for full HDTV (which is about 500mb/second for 1080p30fps which is what you usually get out of a deinterlacer) that made enough of a difference. In theory a clever dec (2nd half half of codec) could save a bit of time knowing it was downscaling to 1/4 as well, but as far as I know nobody has written one. It was interesting to see this working at least partway (at least for those interested in receiving HD and playing it on SDTVs with cheaper CPUs)
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