Timothy Miller wrote:
Since we're having a bit of a lull in the discussions on OGML, I
thought I might start off a discussion about some ideas I've had that
would benefit the Linux community as well as give OGP and Traversal a
boost financially.
The Open Graphics Project has gotten everyone involved a lot of
attention. While it's still possible to get graphics cards supported
by open source drivers, that supply is dwinding. At the rate things
are going, we'll soon have no choices left. Politically and socially,
the OGP is a great idea. Economically, however, it's entirely a
different story. Because of the development and costs involved,
low-end graphics is actually not such a great place to start. The
attention we get because we want to do graphics is a major driving
force, but there are much better ways to get our stream of funds
started.
One such idea that's been brought up before is ultra high end audio.
The low-end is solved; it's called AC97 and is found in every PC
chipset you can buy today. But imagine taking what would normally
cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in audio recording and
production equipment and applying the open source model to it.
Designing and producing a low-end commodity product is hard. But
designing a niche audio product that sold competitively for thousands
of dollars is relatively easy to pull off. To begin with, we now
become much less cost-sensitive for parts, so the end product can be
FPGA-based. That makes OGD1 an ideal development platform for a new
audio device; in fact, it's major overkill. Once the new design is
finished, we'd mass-produce a new board using a smaller FPGA and
include all of the audio I/O hardware directly on-board.
IMHO the one market you could do something in is pro-audio. make it an
acceleration card for Ardour, the open-source Digital Audio Workstation
another idea I had was to make a video compression/decompression
accelerator (plus audio) that could be installed in home-cinema boxes
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