<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On 20/08/2008, at 2:27 PM, Barry Clearwater wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>I take the point that a high def signal is getting heavily compressed,<br>but we *are* talking about well known compression algorithms are we not?<br>Should somebody be writing a more optimised piece decompression code, or<br>in a lower level language? (cough - assembler anybody!!??)<br>ITs just a 2D picture, our systems are capable of rendering 3D on the<br>fly...<br>I must be missing the point and over simplifying it somewhere.<br><pride speaking><br>No way should windows boxes out-compute a gnu/linux system.<br></pride><br></div></blockquote></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>The H264 decode flatlines all OSs if done in software due to the complexity of the decode when dealing with our broadcast streams.</div><div><br></div><div>I've compared Linux and Mac software decode on the same hardware, EyeTV vs MPlayer, and they appear to use similar amounts of CPU.</div><div><br></div><div>The best windows codec for software decode is CoreAVC which is a proprietary commercial codec.</div><div><br></div><div>Until we get a way to accelerate some of the decode on the GPU we are going to lag behind Windows users who have hardware accelerated decode via the main graphics card vendors.</div><div><br></div><div>As to STBs, as mentioned they have chips designed to accelerate the decode in hardware. If you have had a play with the Zinwell STB you would notice that it can get very hot due to the load.</div><div><br></div><div>Steve</div><div><br></div><br><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>Steven Ellis - Technical Director<br>OpenMedia Limited<br>email - <a href="mailto:steven@openmedia.co.nz">steven@openmedia.co.nz</a><br>website - <a href="http://www.openmedia.co.nz/">http://www.openmedia.co.nz</a><br></div></div></span> </div><br></body></html>