On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 8:05 AM, Niels Wagenaar n.wagenaar@xs4all.nl wrote:
Only, in the US most of the HDTV transports don't use H264. At least, I heard from several people that it's HDTV through MPEG2. Over here (Europe) it's mostly HDTV through H264 (only a very small number of MPEG2 HDTV channels over here).
You've been given bad information. There are _some_ HDTV channels broadcast in mpeg2 but most are h264.
Currently I need to use a Core 2 Quad (Q6600 @ 2.40GHz) to get decent and stutter-free H264 decoding using software (FFMpeg SVN, Xine-lib 1.2, Xine-UI and vdr-xine plugin). With my Core 2 Duo (E7300 @ 2.53Ghz) I didn't had enough juice (stuttering, framedrops, etc).
You absolutely do not need a quad-core CPU and your Core 2 Duo should easily handle h264 decoding. I'd say something was misconfigured or so.
Btw, I use CoreAVC here and the cpu usage doesn't go above about 87% on that x2 4400. The h264 implimentation in ffmpeg was very unstable when I tried it although I heard it's gotten much better.