Igor a écrit :
It seams the first hardware capable of MPEG 2 and H.264 encoding and decoding at 1080p full HD resolution, will be from Toshiba, look here:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/04/08/tosh_samples_spursengine/
It says it does H264 decoding and *encoding* ? IMHO that means that this HW is very ahead of current technology or/and very expensive.
there's other bottleneck in Linux
- no any information about LInux drivers for this card,
The only thing I can find is this on Wikipedia: "The SpursEngine is accessible to the developer from a device driver currently in development for Windows and Linux systems." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpursEngine
- the Linux VAAPI for hardware video acceleration is not finish yet
- no any Linux software (ffmpeg and players) that can support hardware video decoding
From what I can understand of the chip/card, it seems to be a (very fast) processing accelerator, much like encryption acceleration instructions in VIA CPUs, or TCP offload engines in some ethernet card. The hardware itself is relatively independent of any specific purpose and API, so it should be "easy" to integrate it either in applications (ffmpeg, mplayer) or the kernel.