[Gllug] Hardware v. Software CODECS?

[Pete Ryland]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 12:57:07PM +0000, Rev Simon Rumble wrote:
> This one time, at band camp, Chris Bell wrote:
> 
> > for audio and video, so are the hardware CODECS generally specific to
> > individual formats, or semi-programmable to enable them to work with a range
> > of formats? Would it be better to spend money on a more expensive video
> > output card rather than a hardware decoder to use with an existing card?
> 
> Sigma Designs has a newish card (x-card?), the successor to the dxr3,
> which is programmable.  But they've been very crap about releasing
> specs so people can actually programme the thing, so there's bugger
> all for it and nothing under Linux.
> 
> If you're mostly watching the output of the DVB card, you could do
> well to get a dxr3 card.  They're a hardware MPEG decoder and have
> fabulous TV-out quality.  mplayer and xine can both cross-encode for
> them.
> 
> Alternatively, you shouldn't have any real problems playing any modern
> codec with your hardware decoding in software.

Except that a PII 450 is not really enough to decode most DVB signals - they
tend to be in the range of 10Mb/s MPEG2s.

Pete
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