While reading your question, I just realized that I did not make distinction between decoding and encoding. Naturally encoding takes pretty much all cpu there is available unless specific hardware encoder is present.
As for decoding, most videocards these days do it just fine, but If I remember correctly from few years back when I was looking into mpeg stuff more, The rule of thumb was not even try with under 500Mhz PII. 1Ghz would be more comfortable. (Even for some DVD drives, the recommended system CPU was 500Mhz level.) Naturally VBR (Variable Bit Rate) requires more CPU than CBR (Constant Bit Rate). In case of set top DVD players, they generally do have ICD mpeg decoders, not a CPU per se. In those, the cheapy ones can be found to be too weak. This is clearly seen as drifting audio, and digital artifacts in the image. Currently I do not know how to rate their CPU equivalent numbers. If you find any information contrary to all this, please let me know. I have not done any *real* research on this for a long time. Petri Will Hill wrote: > How much CPU do you really need? > > On Friday 02 December 2005 10:20 am, Petri Laihonen wrote: > >>Sync problems in computers usually occur for 2 reasons. >>1) Low CPU power. >>2) 2 different devices for one goal. >> >>The first one is very common with especially cheap set top DVD players. >>They do not have enough CPU power to decode Mpeg2. It happens also with >>slow computers. Amount of memory might have something to do with this as >>well, but mostly affects (operates) only as buffer between the change of >>vob files or layers on dvd. > > > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > General at brlug.net > http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net >
