> > --- There probably will be a market for H.264 and MPEG 4. Basicly > > you would be trying to enter the home entertainment pc market. With > > basic video card functions. > > I think that video decoding is a must, including H.264 and MPEG4.
Yes. DVD mpeg1 (early) and mpeg2 (now) Blu-Ray and HD-DVD H.264 OTA digital TV The US uses mpeg2ts (do other countries use other formats?) cable and sat mpeg2 and/or mpeg4 iTunes H.264 Any corrections/additions? > Considering that this is supposed to be FOSS friendly, Ogg > Vorbis/Theora is probably a good idea. Is there a large source of Ogg Vorbis/Theora somewhere? If we use something programmable, like a DSP, adding a new codec should just be a matter of porting the software. If we use a hardware decoder we probably can't support everything. Transcoding the occasional clip can be done on a general purpose computer. Transcoding large amounts of video gets painful fast. > Another question: Are we going to have a hard drive? No. Hard drives go in the general purpose computer (or a NAS) in another room where the noise doesn't matter. Our box reads the data in over Ethernet from the file server. Our box needs to be low power and quiet (fanless). Having a disk will raise the cost as well. If whatever chip we use provides SATA ports, USB, Firewire, we should make that available in case the user wants it. If the user wants a local drive, they plug in an external drive. Assuming we provide USB for keyboard & pointing device we have USB for external drives as well. Same idea with wireless network. Box provides a standard wired Ethernet port. (100 Mbps is enough) Less complexity, lower cost, no FCC issues. HD over wireless is not reliable yet and not recommended. Maybe in a generation or two. If the user wants to try and stream HD over wireless they plug in a wired-to-wireless adapter. > SSD? Any form of > storage to facilitate "media center" activity? This doesn't include > the boot flash, of couse. If we use something programmable, like a DSP, we need a way to load new codecs. This could be downloaded over Ethernet every time, although it might be nice to have some form of local storage. If whatever chip it boots from is socketed/connectorized, you could have two of them, one for experiments and one as a known good backup. The cheapest method is probably to have just enough PROM to tftp the software load from a fileserver. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
