On Wednesday 06 Feb 2008, Ondrej Wisniewski wrote:
With VDR getting ready for HD-TV it seems that today the MPEG4 decoding can only be done on a high end processor or an external decoder card. Many people are still waiting for a FF DVB-S2 card but it doesn't look very promising at the moment.
So I was wondering if it would be possible to use the on board video decoder chips of the VIA EPIA boards like the VIA EPIA EX15000G http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/mainboards/motherboards.jsp?motherboa rd_id=450
This board mounts a CX700M2 chipset which features MPEG2/4 hardware decoding. It has DVI and Y/Pb/Pr video output as well as analog and SPDIF audio (coaxial and optical). So that's everything we need, isn't it.
I know, currently the OpenChrome video driver doesn't support MPEG2/4 video decoding for the CX700M2 and there are probably other things missing from the software support side. But from what I see, this or a similar motherboard in combination with a budget DVB-S2 card have all the hardware features that are needed to have HD-TV. So we actually have the proper hardware platform *today* for a quite a low budget. So if all the efforts go into driver and application development for such a platform, there is no need to wait for FF DVB-S2 cards.
Or am I missing something here?
I think the main problem here is Via not wanting to release information on their chipset to allow MPEG4 support to be built into OpenChrome or similar.
MEPG2 decoding works (at least on the older Via chipsets...) but I think this was mostly reverse-engineered!
I don't think MPEG4 decoding will be supported in this way for a very long time, unless Via have changed their attitudes. (Not really bothered looking into this because HD is years off in the UK where I am, unless you fork out lots to Sky!)
It is a shame to have such hardware and not be able to use it!!
Cheers,
Laz