On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 10:02:06PM -0800, Bob Miller wrote: > Video comes in many formats. I doubt a VIA CPU can handle realtime > decompression of most of those formats. And future codecs will be > more compute intensive. If you're building a single-purpose box that > only uses MPEG compression, and you can get the hardware MPEG decoder > to fly, the VIA boards might be suitable.
I'd disagree to some extent. An intel chip of the 266 MHz starting point can usually handle MPEG-2 decompression in real-time without dropping frames if that's all it's doing. A 366 MHz processor in a laptop can do MPEG in Linux at least without hardware help, though in some other evil OS there is help from the hardware on this particular notebook. A VIA chip around 900MHz or so should be more than adequate for MPEG video. It should do DivX fine as well. More complex formats (which nobody is seriously using at this point in time) are out, but unless there is a major compression breakthrough, DivX video is currently about as good as it gets for quality and compression ratio. Of course, with hardware decoders, a dinky 50 MHz processor is almost fast enough to be useful for some practical purpose. Like presenting a simple GUI to the user, perhaps. But I wouldn't expect you'd know much about that, right? =) _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
