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At 11:20 AM 5/23/2001 +1000, Markus Buchhorn wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite cite>I have some new cards here that I'm just
starting to play with. "Realtime" (we'll see) MPEG2 encoder for
under $US1k, decoder for under $US100. Neither card does RTP
streaming/receiving, but I'm working on that... Still, there is a rapidly
growing market now that you can get MPEG2 on (almost?) one
chip.</blockquote><br>
Are these the kfir-based cards? The linuxtv folks <br>
<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab><a href="http://www.linuxtv.org/mpeg2/kfir.xml" eudora="autourl">http://www.linuxtv.org/mpeg2/kfir.xml</a><br>
<br>
have linux drivers for this mpeg2 encoder. Unfortunately, it has some
issues on some motherboards, including the one on the machine I was
testing with. <br>
<br>
<blockquote type=cite cite>MPEG1 would be a nice intermediate option,
since you can go to decent PAL/NTSC resolution at 30fps within 1.5Mb/s.
The h.261 codecs are CIF (320x240?), right? </blockquote><br>
352x288 actually.<br>
<br>
<blockquote type=cite cite>and (are designed to) run well under 1.5Mb/s.
(it's N*64kb/s to support the ISDN world)</blockquote><br>
There's a realtime MPEG1 software encoder available for Linux. The issue
there is integration with vic (the simple solution of breaking up the
bytestream into packets and sending dumbly over the net breaks badly) and
the MPEG over RTP profiles.<br>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote type=cite cite>At the lower end, is anybody doing something
with H.263 (very low bandwidth)? It's a big area of interest now, as
MPEG-4 uses it, and the PDA/cell-phone companies are very keen on
it.</blockquote><br>
There's an h263 encoder in vic, but it is very slow. We have interested
in H263 since it supports higher resolutions, something we'd like for
doing some sci vis stuff.<br>
<br>
<blockquote type=cite cite>Conversely, some UWash/Stanford guys are
playing with realtime HDTV (40Mb/s at tolerable latency, 270Mb/s for pure
I-frame low-latency :-) ). Point-to-point only so far that I am aware of.
There's also an internet-draft for raw HDTV over RTP(modified) - 1.48Gb/s
:-) Plus I know NEC make some big (3 gun) projectors that have 2500x2000
display space (around $US10k).</blockquote><br>
Woo, cool. SC fodder :-). Is the HDTV gear all still way expensive, or is
the market starting to bring the prices down?<br>
<br>
<blockquote type=cite cite>How flexible is the AG setup to putting in
other codecs or indeed other video tools?</blockquote><br>
Fairly flexible now, will become much more so in the next major turn of
the crank. If someone had a new codec and RTP framing code it would be
fairly straightfoward to add to vic.<br>
<br>
--bob<br>
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