[mythtvnz] CPU required for Freeview HD

[Dean Pemberton]

Barry Clearwater wrote:
> I'm fascinated by the discussion about cpu requirements, can someone
> briefly outline again the reasons that myth needs such huge amount of
> processing for the h264 standard?  Are STB's that powerful, or is it
> done with some proprietary decoder?
> Is our decoder not low-level enough?
>   
As far as I can tell, the h.264 codec trades off transport size (ie
bandwidth required) for being more computationally intensive when you
decompress it.

This isn't a problem if you have hardware to assist you in the decoding
process.
Most set top boxes have this onboard, and there is hardware assist
support for Windows.
Linux on the other hand does not currently have any support to use the
hardware assist in common graphics cards.  This means that all the h.264
decoding must be done on the primary CPU.


Dean