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Technology Stocks : ATI Technologies in 1997 (T.ATY)
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To: NTT who wrote (3297)5/2/1999 3:25:00 PM
From: Carnac  Read Replies (2) of 5927
 
A $500 PC has a Pentium powerful enough for broadcast/cable TV analog-to-MPEG-2 encode and HDTV-rate decode ?!?

The "HDTV decode" you claim is really nothing more than 24 fps fluffy film bitstreams at 1280x720, not the real 60fps or even 1920x1080x24 or full 1920x1088x30i

HDTV requires the full power of a high-end Pentium just to VLD and motion vector reconstruction. Lame.

I argue that a low cost Pentium (say Celeron) with reduced system memory (32 MB) etc. and FULL hardware support for HDTV decode is less expensive and provides a more pleasant experience for the $500 Media PC. The same is true for the digital VCR (encoder) configuration.

MCP is inevitably in hardware to reduce L2 cache trashing, whereas the other stages of decode can at least live within L1.

The coding efficiency of today's software-only encoders is lousy. Have you compared a 4 mbit/sec stream made by Ligos/MGI/etc. against one produced by a C-Cube DVExplore or Sony single-chip encoder ? The lower the bit rate for a level of video quality, the more hours on your hard disk will yield. Factor storage costs into the equation.

Yes, once we have motion estimation and other analysis stages executed in hardware, with the rest on the host CPU, then we are talking inexpensive, quality encoding on the PC.

I think we'll have a long wait as usual.
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