i can see many of us are seeking for the right hardware for vdr, so i am. i want to start some discussion about the upcoming Sony PS3 as an vdr client on steroids. as it will support linux out of the box, it seams logical to, at least, think about it. i came to the following pro/contra list:
pro: it supports HD (and Blue-Ray), is small and living room ready, comes with linux, has powerful CPU, you get a gameconsole for free ;-)
contra: gets hot, likly DRM locked in some regards, it's a sony
the last point may be even not so bad, as sony loses money on each selled device.
so what do others think about this idea? anything i have not thought about that makes it even impossible to run vdr (or some other softdevice client) on the PS3?
best regards ... clemens
Clemens Kirchgatterer wrote:
i can see many of us are seeking for the right hardware for vdr, so i am. i want to start some discussion about the upcoming Sony PS3 as an vdr client on steroids. as it will support linux out of the box, it seams logical to, at least, think about it. i came to the following pro/contra list:
pro: it supports HD (and Blue-Ray), is small and living room ready, comes with linux, has powerful CPU, you get a gameconsole for free ;-)
contra: gets hot, likly DRM locked in some regards, it's a sony
the last point may be even not so bad, as sony loses money on each selled device.
so what do others think about this idea? anything i have not thought about that makes it even impossible to run vdr (or some other softdevice client) on the PS3?
I'd say the only downside of the Linux support kills it as a VDR platform.
Graphic is NOT accelerated.
That's the only downside i'm aware of, and i can understand Sony a little in this point. Otherwise all game developers could just skip paying licensing royalties and just develop for Linux@PS3.
Matthias Schniedermeyer ms@citd.de wrote:
I'd say the only downside of the Linux support kills it as a VDR platform. Graphic is NOT accelerated.
That's the only downside i'm aware of, and i can understand Sony a little in this point. Otherwise all game developers could just skip paying licensing royalties and just develop for Linux@PS3.
but why should this matter for multimedia (video) applications? ok, we (most likely) don't have hardware accelerated xvmc, but 6 vector cores to do it in software.
best regards ... clemens
A PS3 running VDR is more of a novelty item considering the price. For the cost, you could easily build a computer that can handle HDTV, be a lot more robust, and have money left over.
I say this jokingly but not every idea is a good one mate! :)
Well, it all depends on perspective ...
If you had to buy the PS3 just for that purpose, you'd probably be right. In that case, I would rather be looking at a streaming media client. Some of them have HDTV as well these days, such as for example the Kiss DP-600 oder the latest D-Link DSM. Well, you'll probably have lot of frustration with these devices as the hardware is good and cheap, just the software sucks. (I started blogging about that at http://www.avoip.info/.)
Maybe someday a Linux distro for that class of devices will be made available.
But if you have a PS3 anyway, having a VDR client on it will save you just another device in your living room. That makes sense in terms of space, network ports and also input feed connectors of your TV set.
I currently have
- a PS/2 - a plain DVD player - a Pinnacle Showcenter - a Maxdome receiver (www.maxdome.de, basiscally a DSL VoD client) - a DVB-S receiver
all hooked up to my living room TV. No TV set has 5 input jacks and I need six remote controls to handle that. This is not fun, actually.
I do strongly believe that looking for the one hardware platform which has it all (strong CPU, fast ethernet or even gigabit networking, HDMI output with proper scaling for low-res formats), for some people USB and DVD/BlueRay drives, and that has an *open software platform* in which I could plug all my software DVD player (with menus, please!), MPlayer, VDR, Shoutcast, VoD, ... that would be it.
Regarding using a PC: Still the noise / price problem. Either it's cheap and ugly or just way to expensive. Unless you can recommand a fanless "kind of PC" (anything that can run Linux is fine) which either has the TV out, networking and remote control stuff built-in or has suiteable slots for that and is somewhere less than 1000 USD.
Regards, Torsten
VDR User schrieb:
A PS3 running VDR is more of a novelty item considering the price. For the cost, you could easily build a computer that can handle HDTV, be a lot more robust, and have money left over.
I say this jokingly but not every idea is a good one mate! :)
vdr mailing list vdr@linuxtv.org http://www.linuxtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vdr
"VDR User" user.vdr@gmail.com wrote:
A PS3 running VDR is more of a novelty item considering the price. For the cost, you could easily build a computer that can handle HDTV, be a lot more robust, and have money left over.
how this? HPTC cases alone cost 100E upwards, HD-DVD drives go for 200E, then you only have 300E left for HDMI GFX card, MoBo, CPU and Ram. at least, these are the prices i get from google and ebay. so it might be possible to get it cheaper, but this is not obvious to me. and why should a PC be more robust?
besides that, i don't want to argue about a few euros here and there. i find the practical and technical implications of vdr@ps3 more interresting.
I say this jokingly but not every idea is a good one mate! :)
i must agree.
clemens
Clemens Kirchgatterer wrote:
Matthias Schniedermeyer ms@citd.de wrote:
I'd say the only downside of the Linux support kills it as a VDR platform. Graphic is NOT accelerated.
That's the only downside i'm aware of, and i can understand Sony a little in this point. Otherwise all game developers could just skip paying licensing royalties and just develop for Linux@PS3.
but why should this matter for multimedia (video) applications? ok, we (most likely) don't have hardware accelerated xvmc, but 6 vector cores to do it in software.
Video is inherently bandwith intensive. At least (for PAL): 720x576x4x25 = about 40MB/s (*) 1920x1080x4x25 = about 200MB/s
And that's taking aside ANY of the other processing. Decoding, IDCT, YUV->RGB transformation and so on. Also taking aside the total bandwith killer, when you have to scale the material.
AFAICT the vector cores COULD(*2) help you with the first parts, but the rest has to be done by the 3(,?)Ghz RISC PPC-CPU and shoveling that much data back and forth may be a bit much, without any acceleration. But on the other side the PS3 systems is supposed to have an impressing memory-bandwith, which could rescue the day.
So unless someone tries there is no way to be sure, but for the time beeing i'm sceptical.
IOW: - SDTV maybe - HDTV no way without acceleration
*: x4 isn't a typo. Most systems use 32 bit per color. 24 bit "packed" format isn't used anymore AFAIK.
*2: If you have software that can use the SPUs, but unless someone writes a Decoder-Library with SPU support you can only use the Main-CPU.
Bis denn
Matthias Schniedermeyer wrote:
Video is inherently bandwith intensive. At least (for PAL): 720x576x4x25 = about 40MB/s (*) 1920x1080x4x25 = about 200MB/s
And that's taking aside ANY of the other processing. Decoding, IDCT, YUV->RGB transformation and so on. Also taking aside the total bandwith killer, when you have to scale the material.
AFAICT the vector cores COULD(*2) help you with the first parts, but the rest has to be done by the 3(,?)Ghz RISC PPC-CPU and shoveling that much data back and forth may be a bit much, without any acceleration. But on the other side the PS3 systems is supposed to have an impressing memory-bandwith, which could rescue the day.
So unless someone tries there is no way to be sure, but for the time beeing i'm sceptical.
IOW:
- SDTV maybe
- HDTV no way without acceleration
*: x4 isn't a typo. Most systems use 32 bit per color. 24 bit "packed" format isn't used anymore AFAIK.
*2: If you have software that can use the SPUs, but unless someone writes a Decoder-Library with SPU support you can only use the Main-CPU.
Bis denn
Most people AFAICT use vdr for sdtv and while HDTV may or may not be out of the question due to bandwidth sdtv definitely isn't. In fact I have linux on my xbox which has much less bandwidth than even the ps2 and most distros for that have a dvd player.
I am actually looking into a building a working dtv rig for the (original) xbox but am much more limited by the "mere" 60mb (64mb-4mb for the framebuffer) of memory and others have made mythtv clients for it. As someone else pointed out though a PS3 for linux doesn't make much sense unless you already want a PS3. Any applications it runs will, due to the 88mb ram, probably *feel* slower than a 1-2ghz pc with 128mb+ of ram running an quivalent distro even without graphics accelleration.
Btw here is a website that shows what the ps3 linux can access of the ps3's hardware.
http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/support/hardware/breakdown/index.php?hw_ca...
Darren Wilkinson wrote:
Matthias Schniedermeyer wrote:
Video is inherently bandwith intensive. At least (for PAL): 720x576x4x25 = about 40MB/s (*) 1920x1080x4x25 = about 200MB/s
And that's taking aside ANY of the other processing. Decoding, IDCT, YUV->RGB transformation and so on. Also taking aside the total bandwith killer, when you have to scale the material.
AFAICT the vector cores COULD(*2) help you with the first parts, but the rest has to be done by the 3(,?)Ghz RISC PPC-CPU and shoveling that much data back and forth may be a bit much, without any acceleration. But on the other side the PS3 systems is supposed to have an impressing memory-bandwith, which could rescue the day.
So unless someone tries there is no way to be sure, but for the time beeing i'm sceptical.
IOW:
- SDTV maybe
- HDTV no way without acceleration
*: x4 isn't a typo. Most systems use 32 bit per color. 24 bit "packed" format isn't used anymore AFAIK.
*2: If you have software that can use the SPUs, but unless someone writes a Decoder-Library with SPU support you can only use the Main-CPU.
Bis denn
Most people AFAICT use vdr for sdtv and while HDTV may or may not be out of the question due to bandwidth sdtv definitely isn't. In fact I have linux on my xbox which has much less bandwidth than even the ps2 and most distros for that have a dvd player.
The thing with the XBOX is that it pretty much has a standard PC with a standard Geforce 3.5 (AFAIR it is something between the 3 and the 4). So it should have hardware acceleration, which makes it a quite good platform for a video player, although i wouldn't buy one myself.
I am actually looking into a building a working dtv rig for the (original) xbox but am much more limited by the "mere" 60mb (64mb-4mb for the framebuffer) of memory and others have made mythtv clients for it. As someone else pointed out though a PS3 for linux doesn't make much sense unless you already want a PS3. Any applications it runs will, due to the 88mb ram, probably *feel* slower than a 1-2ghz pc with 128mb+ of ram running an quivalent distro even without graphics accelleration.
If i'm not mistaken you mixed it with the memory that the Wii has.
The PS3 and the XBox360 have 512MB total. And i'm quite sure that one of them was a split-memory-architecture (256MB/256MB) and the other one has a unified-memory-architecture. So the PS3 should have something around 240MB or 500MB of available memory.
Bis denn
Matthias Schniedermeyer wrote:
Darren Wilkinson wrote:
Matthias Schniedermeyer wrote:
Video is inherently bandwith intensive. At least (for PAL): 720x576x4x25 = about 40MB/s (*) 1920x1080x4x25 = about 200MB/s
And that's taking aside ANY of the other processing. Decoding, IDCT, YUV->RGB transformation and so on. Also taking aside the total bandwith killer, when you have to scale the material.
AFAICT the vector cores COULD(*2) help you with the first parts, but the rest has to be done by the 3(,?)Ghz RISC PPC-CPU and shoveling that much data back and forth may be a bit much, without any acceleration. But on the other side the PS3 systems is supposed to have an impressing memory-bandwith, which could rescue the day.
So unless someone tries there is no way to be sure, but for the time beeing i'm sceptical.
IOW:
- SDTV maybe
- HDTV no way without acceleration
*: x4 isn't a typo. Most systems use 32 bit per color. 24 bit "packed" format isn't used anymore AFAIK.
*2: If you have software that can use the SPUs, but unless someone writes a Decoder-Library with SPU support you can only use the Main-CPU.
Bis denn
Most people AFAICT use vdr for sdtv and while HDTV may or may not be out of the question due to bandwidth sdtv definitely isn't. In fact I have linux on my xbox which has much less bandwidth than even the ps2 and most distros for that have a dvd player.
The thing with the XBOX is that it pretty much has a standard PC with a standard Geforce 3.5 (AFAIR it is something between the 3 and the 4). So it should have hardware acceleration, which makes it a quite good platform for a video player, although i wouldn't buy one myself.
The xbox does have the hardware but (like the PS3) has no accelerated drivers to use it. Video access is done through the framebuffer but this is more than enough for dvd playback which is the same resolution as sdtv.
I am actually looking into a building a working dtv rig for the (original) xbox but am much more limited by the "mere" 60mb (64mb-4mb for the framebuffer) of memory and others have made mythtv clients for it. As someone else pointed out though a PS3 for linux doesn't make much sense unless you already want a PS3. Any applications it runs will, due to the 88mb ram, probably *feel* slower than a 1-2ghz pc with 128mb+ of ram running an quivalent distro even without graphics accelleration.
If i'm not mistaken you mixed it with the memory that the Wii has.
The PS3 and the XBox360 have 512MB total. And i'm quite sure that one of them was a split-memory-architecture (256MB/256MB) and the other one has a unified-memory-architecture. So the PS3 should have something around 240MB or 500MB of available memory.
Yep, my bad.
On Sat, 6 Jan 2007, Darren Wilkinson wrote:
Matthias Schniedermeyer wrote:
Darren Wilkinson wrote:
Most people AFAICT use vdr for sdtv and while HDTV may or may not be out of the question due to bandwidth sdtv definitely isn't. In fact I have linux on my xbox which has much less bandwidth than even the ps2 and most distros for that have a dvd player.
The thing with the XBOX is that it pretty much has a standard PC with a standard Geforce 3.5 (AFAIR it is something between the 3 and the 4). So it should have hardware acceleration, which makes it a quite good platform for a video player, although i wouldn't buy one myself.
The xbox does have the hardware but (like the PS3) has no accelerated drivers to use it. Video access is done through the framebuffer but this is more than enough for dvd playback which is the same resolution as sdtv.
XBox has accelerated video driver in DirectFB (video overlay with YUV->RGB conversion and scaling). Decoding 720x576 mpeg2 with xine-lib uses ~20% of CPU power, another 10% is used to copy data around.
I am actually looking into a building a working dtv rig for the (original) xbox but am much more limited by the "mere" 60mb (64mb-4mb for the framebuffer) of memory
Memory is just enough for simple DirectFB player, even with no swap (I use xineliboutput vdr-fbfe on diskless XBox). But for VDR and software player RAM is definetely too small. Anyway, installing VDR to XBox does not make much sense as one can't attach DVB cards to XBox, so using separate server for cards (and VDR) is required.
- Petri
Petri Hintukainen wrote:
On Sat, 6 Jan 2007, Darren Wilkinson wrote:
Matthias Schniedermeyer wrote:
Darren Wilkinson wrote:
Most people AFAICT use vdr for sdtv and while HDTV may or may not
be out
of the question due to bandwidth sdtv definitely isn't. In fact I
have
linux on my xbox which has much less bandwidth than even the ps2 and most distros for that have a dvd player.
The thing with the XBOX is that it pretty much has a standard PC with a standard Geforce 3.5 (AFAIR it is something between the 3 and the 4). So it should have hardware acceleration, which makes it a quite good platform for a video player, although i wouldn't buy one myself.
The xbox does have the hardware but (like the PS3) has no accelerated drivers to use it. Video access is done through the framebuffer but this is more than enough for dvd playback which is the same resolution as sdtv.
XBox has accelerated video driver in DirectFB (video overlay with YUV->RGB conversion and scaling). Decoding 720x576 mpeg2 with xine-lib uses ~20% of CPU power, another 10% is used to copy data around.
I am actually looking into a building a working dtv rig for the (original) xbox but am much more limited by the "mere" 60mb
(64mb-4mb
for the framebuffer) of memory
Memory is just enough for simple DirectFB player, even with no swap (I use xineliboutput vdr-fbfe on diskless XBox). But for VDR and software player RAM is definetely too small. Anyway, installing VDR to XBox does not make much sense as one can't attach DVB cards to XBox, so using separate server for cards (and VDR) is required.
There are usb 1.1 digital tv sticks in existence that could be used with the xbox.
On Tue, 9 Jan 2007, Darren Wilkinson wrote:
Petri Hintukainen wrote:
Anyway, installing VDR to XBox does not make much sense as one can't attach DVB cards to XBox, so using separate server for cards (and VDR) is required.
There are usb 1.1 digital tv sticks in existence that could be used with the xbox.
In theory, yes. But USB 1.1 has very limited bandwidth, so you can receive or record only one channel at time (maybe even two in optimal conditions ?).
- Petri
Matthias Schniedermeyer wrote:
Clemens Kirchgatterer wrote:
Matthias Schniedermeyer ms@citd.de wrote:
I'd say the only downside of the Linux support kills it as a VDR platform. Graphic is NOT accelerated.
That's the only downside i'm aware of, and i can understand Sony a little in this point. Otherwise all game developers could just skip paying licensing royalties and just develop for Linux@PS3.
but why should this matter for multimedia (video) applications? ok, we (most likely) don't have hardware accelerated xvmc, but 6 vector cores to do it in software.
Video is inherently bandwith intensive. At least (for PAL): 720x576x4x25 = about 40MB/s (*) 1920x1080x4x25 = about 200MB/s
And that's taking aside ANY of the other processing. Decoding, IDCT, YUV->RGB transformation and so on. Also taking aside the total bandwith killer, when you have to scale the material.
AFAICT the vector cores COULD(*2) help you with the first parts, but the rest has to be done by the 3(,?)Ghz RISC PPC-CPU and shoveling that much data back and forth may be a bit much, without any acceleration. But on the other side the PS3 systems is supposed to have an impressing memory-bandwith, which could rescue the day.
So unless someone tries there is no way to be sure, but for the time beeing i'm sceptical.
IOW:
- SDTV maybe
- HDTV no way without acceleration
*: x4 isn't a typo. Most systems use 32 bit per color. 24 bit "packed" format isn't used anymore AFAIK.
*2: If you have software that can use the SPUs, but unless someone writes a Decoder-Library with SPU support you can only use the Main-CPU.
I hardly believe that PS3 would suffer at all when doing HDTV without acceleration. There was a test several months ago of the cell processor. It handled 48 SDTV MPEG2 streams in real time and displayed, thus scaled down, them all at the same time on HDTV screen. I don't think hardware acceleration is needed for x264 HDTV decoding. Only problem is the DRM part and of course BR disc playing under Linux.
Br, Pasi
Pasi Juppo wrote:
Matthias Schniedermeyer wrote:
Clemens Kirchgatterer wrote:
Matthias Schniedermeyer ms@citd.de wrote:
I'd say the only downside of the Linux support kills it as a VDR platform. Graphic is NOT accelerated.
That's the only downside i'm aware of, and i can understand Sony a little in this point. Otherwise all game developers could just skip paying licensing royalties and just develop for Linux@PS3.
but why should this matter for multimedia (video) applications? ok, we (most likely) don't have hardware accelerated xvmc, but 6 vector cores to do it in software.
Video is inherently bandwith intensive. At least (for PAL): 720x576x4x25 = about 40MB/s (*) 1920x1080x4x25 = about 200MB/s
And that's taking aside ANY of the other processing. Decoding, IDCT, YUV->RGB transformation and so on. Also taking aside the total bandwith killer, when you have to scale the material.
AFAICT the vector cores COULD(*2) help you with the first parts, but the rest has to be done by the 3(,?)Ghz RISC PPC-CPU and shoveling that much data back and forth may be a bit much, without any acceleration. But on the other side the PS3 systems is supposed to have an impressing memory-bandwith, which could rescue the day.
So unless someone tries there is no way to be sure, but for the time beeing i'm sceptical.
IOW:
- SDTV maybe
- HDTV no way without acceleration
*: x4 isn't a typo. Most systems use 32 bit per color. 24 bit "packed" format isn't used anymore AFAIK.
*2: If you have software that can use the SPUs, but unless someone writes a Decoder-Library with SPU support you can only use the Main-CPU.
I hardly believe that PS3 would suffer at all when doing HDTV without acceleration. There was a test several months ago of the cell processor. It handled 48 SDTV MPEG2 streams in real time and displayed, thus scaled down, them all at the same time on HDTV screen. I don't think hardware acceleration is needed for x264 HDTV decoding. Only problem is the DRM part and of course BR disc playing under Linux.
I just tried playing back a Mpeg4 AVC HDTV (1900x1080) video(*) with xine -V xshm That sould be pretty much unaccelerated. My system (CORE 2 Duo E6700, or about the fastest "not extreme" CPU you can currently buy, sided by 2GB DDR2-800 RAM and a Geforce 7600GT) does that with about 90% CPU for the xine task and 9% for X. IOW it pretty much sucks up all power from one of the two cores.
So i revise my guess. The PS3 may still be able to play back a Full HDTV stream. Maybe even a decoder just using Altivec optimizion provides enough raw horsepower to do the job. (IIRC the PowerPC-CPU of the PS3 has Altivec.) If not, offloading just enough of the processing to the SPUs to have enough horsepowers left for the rest may be the way to go for a "PS3-Media-Center".
*: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd I used the http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/bbcmotiongalleryreel.html
Bis denn
Am Donnerstag, 4. Januar 2007 13:30 schrieb Clemens Kirchgatterer:
so what do others think about this idea? anything i have not thought about that makes it even impossible to run vdr (or some other softdevice client) on the PS3?
As you can see here: http://www.gnulinux.dk/arj/?p=88
MMS (www.mymediasystem.com) is already running on a PS3, so at least a vdr-client (frontend) should easily be possible ;)
Lg Roman
___________________________________________________________ Telefonate ohne weitere Kosten vom PC zum PC: http://messenger.yahoo.de
Clemens Kirchgatterer wrote:
i can see many of us are seeking for the right hardware for vdr, so i am. i want to start some discussion about the upcoming Sony PS3 as an vdr client on steroids. as it will support linux out of the box, it seams logical to, at least, think about it.
I like the idea. Has anybody gotten VDR to run on the PS3 in the meantime?
Apparently, there is a commercial "vdr" system for the PS3 available now.
It's a bit hard to find concrete technical information on the above web site, but it seems that this a DVB-T box and it costs 100 Euros.
Not really exciting.
I am looking for a silent, SAT-HDTV capable, inexpensive system.
Would the PS3 be a good base for that?
Any other suggestions?
Carsten.
-
Carsten Koch -
Clemens Kirchgatterer -
Darren Wilkinson -
Matthias Schniedermeyer -
Pasi Juppo -
Petri Hintukainen -
Qwasi -
Torsten Schlabach -
VDR User