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9th March 2007, 21:45 | #1 | Link |
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Re: in News apple $50 hardware chip
If you read the news section today here, there is a rumor that apple will add hardware h.264 encoding and decoding, and I'm just curious.
1. Is this enough of a reason for you to by a mac? 2. If anyone has anyone that knows the kind of quality you could expect from the chip they may use? 3.If the quality is good, is there any other company that you've heard of offering , or working on offering, this in an add on board that would be aimed at consumer level pricing. Last edited by grumpy; 9th March 2007 at 21:56. Reason: me grammer good |
9th March 2007, 22:12 | #2 | Link |
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I'm interested in this too. I'm wondering if there's a HAL-type layer, or even just a driver, that invokes this hardware encoder.
Hopefully there's people out there who use current hardware (MPEG-2, even -4) encoders...who can enlighten us.
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10th March 2007, 00:24 | #3 | Link | |
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Buy a new computer to get a $50 encoder chip?
Not much point, especially if you already have an XP system. For $79, you can get a USB h.264 encoder that can encode at 5x real-time speed: http://www.adstech.com/products/RDX-...sp?pid=RDX-160 Quote:
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10th March 2007, 00:24 | #4 | Link |
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I really dubt that Apple will introduce specific hardware H264 decoding/encoding chips in the next Macs. What they will do in my opinion is to use the video card capabilities for this tasks.
MPEG2 decoding is already available both in Windows and Mac OS X (via Apple DVD Player only). Hardware H264 decoding with Nvidia and ATI cards is already available on Windows. They will add it to the next release of Mac OS X (Leopard) probably. Then they have probably come up with a method to encode to H264 employing your graphic card. It is possible and discussed on the x264 mailing list, just not implemented in open source. So my guess is that they will have this new features in Mac OS X Leopard, and QuickTime 8 too. |
10th March 2007, 07:06 | #6 | Link |
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Curious, but what about doing reference frame decoding on the GPU? Well, now that I think about it, there's no CABAC and you already have the mocomped reference, so all you'd do is dequantize and add. Hmm. Or what about shoveling data into it and doing CABAC there? Basically, I'm just trying to figure out which parts are the least integrated and thus the most offloadable, but you'd know far better than I would.
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10th March 2007, 10:57 | #7 | Link | |
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11th March 2007, 09:18 | #8 | Link |
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A GPU is really bad at doing CABAC, since CABAC is inherently a serial process while a GPU gets most of its speed by having lots of parallel processors.
There's no point in offloading just dequant+iDCT to the GPU, since that takes about 1% of ffh264's cpu-time. So the only reasonable division of labor in a decoder is: CPU does CABAC, GPU does everything involving pixels and DCT. |
11th March 2007, 13:58 | #9 | Link | |
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