> 1) The DisplayLink 160 chip. Running uncompressed screen information > is an > OK solution, but of course it requires more hardware to actually > decode in real > time. My 3 Ghz dual core can do it, but I doubt all the interested > consumers have > that kind of power (many do, yes, but laptops are getting more > popular). Still > something to consider.
I've been thinking about this one. At first it seemed like having a lossless compression would provide a great solution that could be used for anything (video, CAD, games, ...). But it has some disadvantages. We'd have to decode in the host computer, then reencode in the DisplayLink's lossless codec. So it is less efficient. Then I thought, why couldn't we use one of the video decoder chips in the Ethervideo box, and have the host computer encode CAD/game/whatever output into mpeg? The video case would be more efficient, and the CAD/game/whatever cases wouldn't be any worse, modulo whatever differences there are in codec encoding overhead. Plus the small detail that the current DisplayLink chips apparently do not support 1080. > 3) The 900Mhz TI DSP. This looks fantastic! 7200 MACs, only $70, etc. Is it fast enough? > 4) The Ambarella chip. This looks good, is low power, etc, but I > imagine it would > be more useful in an application that uses the encoding and > processing. We can > easily adjust our requirements to support this, however -- I linked > to an Engadget > article a while back with a bunch of people commenting that they > would buy a > PCI H.264 encoder accelerator in a second, and I don't see how an > ethernet one > is any different. There is a market for a HD encoder. Some people want to be able to take component output from a cable/sat box and timeshift it. I'm not sure how large this market is. I think the market for an inexpensive decode box will be large. Do we have an idea of how much extra it would cost to add encode? The Fujitsu chip at $247 seems spendy, are there less expensive encoders? $247 would make the box too expensive for people who only need decode. > 5) The broadcom chip (BCM7412). This in again a nice SoC solution. Yes, the Broadcom chips look promising. Under $40 for the BCM70010/BCM70012 sounds workable, and for our app we might not need both chips, so it might be even cheaper. Do we have a price for the BCM7412? _______________________________________________ Open-hardware-ethervideo mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-hardware-ethervideo
