+++ Phil Endecott [2011-04-10 23:02 +0000]: > Dear All, > > For a while I have been planning to make some sort of "TV computer" > > If I look at packages.debian.org I can see that lots of things like vlc, > mplayer > etc. are available for arm* - but there's a difference between having built > successfully and actually working on real hardware at real data rates. So do > those packages know about e.g. video hardware features in any of the available > ARM hardware?
I've been thinking about this too - and was kind of waiting for some suitable hardware to turn up too. As I run a very old via ITX box for TV I know all about hardware that's not quite fast enough - and that has hardware MPEG2 decoding, but still requires plenty of tweaking to work nicely. I'd expect that to make this work at useful framerates you'll need a big fight with proprietary drivers and some hardware with the right sort of video decoding assist. I know that, for example iMX51 hardware can do 720p OK (with the proprietary drivers), but it simply can't manage HD video. > I'm wondering if I can use a Pandaboard. It has plenty of video output > features > but it is a bit weak on the other connectivity - the DVD, DVB-T, disk and > ethernet would all be behind one USB hub. Tegra devices are a bit stronger as > they have mini-pcie which could be connected up to SATA, but I've not found > any > actually-available hardware that does that. These devices can almost certainly be made to do a good job (I recall seeing a samsung dev kit playing 4 videos at once about 3 years ago), but it's not exactly a well-trodden path at the moment. Take a look at what the Linaro landing teams for the various devices are working on - they'll know what currently works. You may well find that this sort of activity works rather better with armhf than armel. That port is installable with a bit of fiddling, but I have no idea how many multimedia packages have been built for it. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM http://wookware.org/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
