On Thu, Apr 21, 2005 at 01:24:36PM +0200, Carsten Koch wrote:
Gee, back 5 years ago when I bought my first FF card to build a VDR system out of an old 150MHz PentiumPro PC, it seemed like a nice idea to have the MPEG decoder on the card. Today, given the facts that
- a FF card costs as much as 3 or more budget cards
- a FF card has smaller bandwidth that a budget card and thus can record less streams in parallel
- a FF card contains closed source firmware that crases on various perfectly legitimate occasions (such as distorted signal due to bad weather or HDTV signals)
I am wondering how well the alternative solutions which do not require a FF card work.
I'd like to see a HW decoder (Mpeg 1/2/4), S-Video and DVI out for 720p and 1080i on a graphic card with an open source driver supporting this decoder.
The question is: will this ever happen?
Is a FF card still the most stable solution (except for bad weather or HDTV of course)? How reliable is the latest xine plugin? How reliable is the latest framebuffer plugin? Are there more solutions that work with a budget card alone?
The main problem is: you need CPU power and therefore you'll get a system which can not passive cooled and even a low noise cooling is a big problem.
Werner