[mythtv-users] HDTV on Xbox frontend

[Neil Davidson]

>	So, even though the Xbox is just a FE it still needs to do decoding
in order to diplay 
>correctly or for that matter at all?
>	 
>	I assumed that the BE did all the work since it contains the capture
card and storage was also 
>on the backend, the FE was just a conduit to the TV. 

Where HDTV and digital broadcasts are concerned the backend actually doesn't
do nearly as much work as you would imagine. Granted to managed the capture
hardware, storage, database, recordings, etc, etc, etc. BUT, the video it is
capturing is already compressed and in a usable form so it does very little
processing (unlike standard definition analogue signals which it needs to
compress into MPEG-2, MPEG-4 or something similar) just moving and storing
data.

With HDTV the front end has to decompress a very large amount of data, if
the backend was to do this then you would need to send *massive* amounts of
data over the network (1920 x 1080 x 24bit x 25 frames a second)