[mythtv-users] Capture cards

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Sat Jan 13 14:56:54 UTC 2007


On Jan 13, 2007, at 3:30 AM, Rudy Zijlstra wrote:

> Nick Rout wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 12 Jan 2007 09:26:17 -0700
>> Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> As time goes on slow CPUs will become rarer, and I think we will
>>> start to see video cards that can do some sort of hardware MPEG-4
>>> playback. The satellite companies are going to move to MPEG-4
>>> eventually to save bandwidth, and the BBC HD tests are an MPEG-4
>>> variant.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Its their opportunity to get proprietary again. There are many  
>> more versions of mpeg4 than mpeg - by the way are we talking mpeg4  
>> as in xvid and its cousins or mpeg4 as in h.264?
>>
>>
> H.264 is used for this.


Well I was speaking of MPEG-4 in general, and was including xvid, H. 
264 and VC-1 as MPEG-4 "variants". I was using the term basically to  
mean "something "better" than MPEG-2".

Then there is "VC-1" which the Microsoft lawyers would want you to  
believe is a completely new and different thing, but it certainly has  
roots in the MPEG-4 systems. I have an on-demand box that stores 100  
hours on 80GB and, much as I hate to admit it, it looks damn good.

As was pointed out, they are "at it again", trying to "get  
proprietary". Such tactics never work in the end, but they keep trying.

I see the Chinese are trying to roll out a non-MPEG replacement for  
the DVD format to avoid the MPEG tax. Even if they only wind up  
selling to domestic customers that is a *lot* of disks.




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