Cancelled Sky HD

[SiM]

Thanks, I'll give that a go... But regardless, it is better to have slightly too much CPU power for h.264 rather than the minimum requirement... I would personally go for more than 1.8GHz especially for s775. The 2.0GHz cpu costs 36p more than the 1.8GHz one on scan

[Butuz]

Originally Posted by directhex

the most demanding HD content in the world (BBC HD)

Are you kidding me? Most of the stuff on BBC HD is not even HD and the stuff that is supposed to be changes in quality between individual camera shots!

I cancelled SkyHD4 months ago and TBH don't really miss it that much. Do miss the occasional HD movie.. but well £60 a month odd....

Butuz

[directhex]

Originally Posted by Butuz

Are you kidding me? Most of the stuff on BBC HD is not even HD and the stuff that is supposed to be changes in quality between individual camera shots!

I cancelled SkyHD4 months ago and TBH don't really miss it that much. Do miss the occasional HD movie.. but well £60 a month odd....

Butuz

strange as it may sound, no, i'm not kidding

BBC HD streams have all the most demanding encoder settings turned on - settings which substitute CPU consumption in the place of bitrate.

and if you want bad-looking HD, try america:

Comcast HD Quality Reduction: Details, Screenshots - AVS Forum

[TheAnimus]

VLC's mpeg playing is truely, truely awful.

Under no OS (ubun,xp,vista) can i play back 1080p on my media pc (intel 945GMA graphics.

Is it the fault of hte graphics card not been compatible with their attempts to hardware accelerate, or the lack of hardware acceleration?

I'd be very tempted to not have a media renderer in each room, but simply put HDMI out over the Cat5e. The devices to do this are really rather cheap now, and you could have one cheaply built PC that looks ugly, with two PCIe graphics cards running 4 rooms very happily. Someone at work was saying that they got Myth to support the monitors as seperate devices, but then again this is someone who seams to live for virtualisation, so it might not be there yet. But even just having cheaper pcs that are built using standard components, would save money, and more importantly in my mind, be silent!

[directhex]

vlc uses libavcodec (from ffmpeg) for h264 decoding. libavcodec has *no* fancy hardware accelerated decoding (it has none of its own stuff built in, and doesn't support systems like directshow for allowing a third party codec to decode). so whether you're using a radeon, intel, or sis, you won't be able to use gpu acceleration. that said, the bits *after* decoding can be sped up - color conversion, scaling, etc. poke about with the output module, to ensure it's using something with low CPU consumption (i don't know what options it gives on windows, but on Linux, Xv is typically the least CPU-hungry output module in video apps). also try the same skiploopfilter setting. and in linux, turn off eye candy like compiz, to reduce tearing.

generally speaking though, if VLC isn't using multiple threads for h264 decodes... well, good luck if it isn't

open-source AV libraries are usually built for completeness and correctness first, with optimization considered later. h264 development is active and progressing fast. and as knuth said, "premature optimization is the root of all evil"