Yeah, I'm a bit iffy on the lack of modem.. I have actually used the modem on my current PowerBook a few times. Although, the last time I used it was well over a year ago.
If I were making the call, I would have left the modem in for another generation of the product. Maybe Internet access via cell network + bluetooth will be easy and cheap by then (probably not), and WiFi will certainly be even more common - maybe even ubiquitous with WiMax.
But, given my infrequent use of the modem, this won't play a part in my purchase decision. I wil just pick up the USB modem, and have it available for the rare occasion that I need modem access on one of my systems.
I have never actually used the FW800 port on my PowerBook. Mostly because disk enclosures with FW800 are not as common as FW400 enclosures.
So, I have mixed feelings on the lack of FW800. It was something I had planned to use, when I found supporting devices. But, it's something I can live without pretty easily.
I think the omission on the "MacBook" had more to do with the Intel chipsets available, and its capabilities, rather than a choice to eliminate them.
The modem is a similar situation.. 95% of the time I use wired ot 802.11 networking. But, in a pinch I have had to use dialup. It would be nice to have in there. Their tiny USB modem is a good compromise, but it's yet another gadget to carry in my bag.
Yes, but any reasonably designed system (a system developed in an open process) would surely include printing paper copies of every ballot, which could be validated by the voter and used for manual counts.
How you're taxed also depends on what type of stock options you have, Incentive Stock Options (ISO) or Non-Qualified.
Execs are given (give themselves) Incentive Stock Options. They can excercise them, and sell them at a later date. If they hold them for a year before selling them, they are taxed as long term capital gains.
Rank and file workers are given Non-Qualified stock options, which must be reported at exercise time. Your profits on that stock option sale are taxed as normal income -- so, it pushes you up the tax bracket and inevitably gets taxed at a much higher rate than 15% LTCG. (Back in the Internet glory days, I was fortunate to get some stock option proceeds, and with Federal Tax + California State Tax, I got to keep about 50% of the profits.)
Either way, stock options proceeds are nice.. It's just that "The Man" gets to hold onto a lot more of his money than the rest of us.
This is great.. I hope Diebold takes a strong stand here, making it obvious to even the most non-technical person that closed voting system, and Diebold specifically, is a really bad idea.
Openness has proven very useful for software development.
History has also shown it to be very important for government.
Combine those two together, and the importance is even more drastic. Openness and transparency in voting is essential.
I like the idea of having the "Tier 2" story listings. But, having them fragmented below each tier 1 story seems inefficient to me. There is no way to check them at a glance. You must cycle through all the stories, reading the snippets below each... very slow going.
Placing them in one of the sections on the right-hand side seems like a better way to me (where the 'older stuff', category overviews, or advertisements usually are).
Exactly.. Using a virtual machine is a lot less painful than rebooting into another OS. VMWare will be a great option to run those few Windows-only apps I need occasionally. Especially with a dual core system, VMWare should run very well, while neither side will suffer too much (assuming you have enough RAM).
Once VirtualPC or VMWare are available for the MacBook, I will be selling my current PowerBook and getting one. Go for the 120GB disk option, and upgrade the RAM to 2GB, and this should be a really nice machine.
Also, wasn't the Intel CPU used in the MacBook supposed to have some new virtual machine hardware support? I wonder if this will offer any improvements in VirtualPC/VMWare.
That article was useless.. Who cares what hoops he had to jump through to get his particular hardware working. He chose the hardware poorly, making it difficult to set up. This is not relevant to the Home Media Center topic at all, and if anything makes the reader hesitant to use Linux for this purpose.
Relevant topics would have been:
- MythTV: provides an excellent media center interface, on par with anything for Windows or MacOS. It provides features that the others can't/won't provide, such as autoamtic commercial detection/removal, transcoding, etc.
- HDTV integration: Receiver cards, Over-The-Air vs. QAM Cable options, etc.
I use MythTV, and I find it to be great. But, DVD playback on Linux I find to be pretty poor. I want a full-screen DVD player, controlled via an IR remote, which can handle VIDEO_TS directories on a file server (not the actual disk). MacOS X's DVD player is better than the Linux options, and there are many better Windows options (like TheaterTek).
The year of the big clunky HTPC?
on
The Year of the HTPC
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Wow, all of those cases were huge. My preference has always been to put the minimal possible system connected to my display device, and put all the storage and other backend hardware in a cheap beige-box somewhere else.
With MythTV, this works great. The backend houses the disks & receiver cards, the frontend just does display output, and they talk over the network.
Some people have set up cool mini-itx type systems for the frontend, using either flash storage or network boot, to get the MythTV front end in a small quiet form. A really cool project is MythRoku, which runs the MythTV frontend on the Roku HD Media Player (Linux based, embedded MIPS platform with hardware HD decoder). It's small and silent, and fits in well with home entertainment devices.
My Mac Mini would also make an excellent MythTV frontend.. If Apple would get a fucking clue and enable an API to the MPEG2 acceleration hardware on the GPU. Without that, it doesn't have the horsepower to do HD display/decoding.
Did I just miss it, or were they absolutely no references to the clock speeds of any CPUs in the article?
The cpu speeds have hit a plateau for the last couple years. (Yes, I know about the P4->PM core changes, but even considering that, clock speeds have been stagnant).
Will the changes to 65nm and later 45nm enable 4GHz++ clock speeds? Or, is all this multi-core talk implying that Intel will be "building out rather than building up"?
Anyone kow of any efforts to get this working on MacOS?
I am currently using OpenLDAP, which is fine if you're willing to make the effort to learn the details and differences of OpenLDAP. Fedora DS would be much easier to manage, extend the schema, etc.
I went through this same process when putting together a system for my MythTV box.
MythTV allows for your frontent (display system) to be seperate from your backend (receiver cards, storage, transcoding - commercial removal, etc.). So you can make a big, cheap, powerful, loud system to do all the heavy lifting, and make a scaled down front-end as quiet as possible.
But, if you need to put them all in one box, you should consider power/heat in all components. Here are the main points in mine:
- Athlon64 CPU. Lower power requirements in general, and Cool 'n Quiet feature to slow down the processor, make it much better than Intels. - Large Heat Sink + Fan. A large copper Zalman HSF runs very quiet. In my system, with cool 'n quiet enabled, the fan actually turns off most of the time it's not doing heavy lifting. - Good case, designed for quiet operation. The Antec Sonata has a fairly quiet power supply (the newer unit has the single large fan on the underside of the PSU), and a large case fan. The large fans run slower/quieter and still push a lot of air. - Quiet HDD. I prefer Seagate Barracuda. This used to be hard to find, but now it seems most HDD manufacturers are making quiet drives with fluid bearings. The Antec case has rubber connectors where the HDD attaches to cut down on vibration noise. If you can use network file storage, using a 2.5" drive will cut down even more on power/noise/heat/vibration and size issues. (Taking it even further, some people use a flash based system, or network boot, to eliminate spinning disks completely). - Fanless Video Card. The Nvidia FX5200 can be found fanless from many places. It supports MPEG2 acceleration in Linux (XvMC) and works well with MythTV.
Throw a Hauppage PVR-500 Dual SD tuner card in there, with a couple HD3000 cards from http://www.pchdtv.com/ and you've got a great MythTV PVR.
The small size is half the point. It is called Mini, after all. There is nothing crippled about it, it is quiet, compact and powerful enough for anything but gaming.
With my Mini, using external firewire drives and/or network drives is more than sufficient. I definitely would not want to trade off the small size, low power, low heat, and low noise of the current design just to have more internal storage.
Weak article, all speculation.
on
Mac mini, Apple DVR?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
We all know how reliable Think Secret is with there "inside info". This looks like another case of ass-talking.
Some of their quotes from this article just seemed silly.. "It is similarly unknown whether Apple will scrap the 2.5-inch hard drive currently featured in the Mac mini in favor a standard 3.5-inch hard drive". WTF? Have they seen a Mac Mini? A 3.5" drive would require a completely new, much larger, case. Also, 3.5" drives account for 10W+ more power/heat, which is a no-go in the tiny confines of the Mac Mini.
Ever since the x86 announcement, people have been speculating that the Mini would be one of the first to go Intel. I don't see this.. Even the Pentium-M processors can't go as low in power/heat as the PowerPC G4's. The extremely small space of the Mini tells me that it would be the last to go x86, not the first.
Is there some value that I'm missing in this? Why does any care that some rich guy made a balloon to take him up 60K ft? Is there some practical application that he is trying to improve this technology for? Or, is he just trying to pump his own ego?
I am interested in this device, both for home and mobile uses. At home, it's a sort of adjunct to the home entertainment system. A limited web browser to keep up on scores/stats while watching football. Or, a WiFi based remote control for my MythTV system.
I could also see using it for mobile purposes, rather than opening my 15" PowerBook, I would whip out this tablet as a WiFi detector and casual www/e-mail checker.
In the car, I would love to use a device like this for GPS navigation. There are several bluetooth GPS units available. If a company like Garmin or TomTom would sell their software for this unit, it would make a great nav system. A 2GB+ SD card should allow enough room for map data, with space to spare for other apps.
I am interested in buying a new car, and I found this analysis almost completely worthless.
- I am not expecting the hybrid to be better economically. - I am willing to exchange sending money to the car manufacturer for sending money to oil producers.
- I am not willing to buy a tiny economy car, to get lower overall costs with a convential engine.
Hybrid technology allows me to get a car that I want, like the Ford Escape, or Toyota Hybrid SUV; while increasing the gas mileage over what it otherwise would be. If that means I pay $3,000 to Ford, rather than $2,200 to oil companies, that's fine with me.
In some areas, like the snowy Northern states, the smaller economy cars are not a great option. I would much rather have my sisters driving their kids around in four wheel drive vehicles in that stuff, rather than small/cheap economy cars. If hybrid allows those cars to be decent in fuel efficiency, that's all the better.
I live in Mountain View, so I'm very interested to see what the offering will hold. I'll also be interested to see how wireless network access holds up on a large scale deployment with lots of users. Sharing a wireless network in a household with one to six people is easy. But, when I'm trying to access Google's wireless network along with all of my neighbors, will it withstand the load?
Google has huge bandwidth to their corporate site.. What kind of bandwidth will the wifi network have on the backend? It could be very interesting if the 802.11G wifi has a big pipe servicing it, then it becomes more attractive than my existing 3+Mbps cable service.
> I don't think you should place a price upon the value of saving civilization.
That's silly.. The goal is "saving civilization". There are many ways to accomplish this goal, a perfectly valid input into the decision process is "how much does this method cost".
PDF has become a ubiquitous standard for sharing documents on the Internet.
Conclusion for a normal business:
We better make sure we support PDF as well as possible and make sure our users can take advantage of this defacto standard.
Conclusion for a monopoly:
Some other company has managed to carve out a tiny stronghold in our otherwise impenetrable wall of power. We must use our power to overrun this foreign code with our proprietary replica of their technology.
Yeah, that's true when talking about DVD playback. But, for HDTV playback it's not so easy..
Decoding 720p MPEG2 in software takes about 80% of my Athlon64 3200+ CPU. Using MPEG2 acceleration, it takes only 25% of my CPU, leaving CPU for commercial flagging or transcoding.
Doing full MPEG2 decoding, not just acceleration, like the VIA/S3 Unichrome chips, gives even lower CPU usage - enabling all kinds of CPU intensive post processing without interfering with the DVR.
Now, when you consider the growing popularity of H.264 (aka MPEG4.10 and AVC), and the extremely high CPU requirements for decoding it, acceleration and hardware decoding becomes even more important. Even high end CPUs have a hard time displaying high resolution H.264 without dropping frames. If upcoming CPUs can handle the task, they still won't leave much idle CPU time for handling other tasks on the PVR.
I actually have less need for MPEG encoding, because all HDTV material is pre-encoded for broadcast, and SDTV material is easily encoded using any one of the available TV receiver cards with MPEG2 encoder. But, maybe you're talking about transcoding.. I agree with that, a chip that could convert my MPEG2 HDTV material to H.264, decreasing the size on disk by about 50%, would be great.
Okay, I'm not a gamer.. So, this pretty much eliminates me from the target market of any of the new video cards. But, I am willing to pay quite a lot, for a video card that does things I am interested in. Such as:
- Video acceleration. Full MPEG decoding (not just iDCT+MC offload) for MPEG2, like the Unichrome video chips do. Full H.264 decoding is even more important, given its growing popularity and huge CPU requirements.
- Open Source drivers, with full functionality. Good Linux support, enabling all the important hardware functions of the card would be a great start (basically noone does this today).
- Silent operation. Loud cooling fans are a no-go for me.
- HDTV output - Good support for standard HDTV (1080i/720p) resolution & synch rates. Support for DVI / VGA / and Component outputs.
- Decent 3D support - enough to handle the 3D acceleration being used in GUIs, and basic gaming.
Well, that's the whole point.. you use the portable devices where/when you don't have a TV handy. Portable DVDs, iPods, PSPs and such are really nice to have on long plane flights. They're also great to keep kids occupied on long drives.
Why would you care about any of these in the context of home usage?
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Yeah, I'm a bit iffy on the lack of modem.. I have actually used the modem on my current PowerBook a few times. Although, the last time I used it was well over a year ago.
If I were making the call, I would have left the modem in for another generation of the product. Maybe Internet access via cell network + bluetooth will be easy and cheap by then (probably not), and WiFi will certainly be even more common - maybe even ubiquitous with WiMax.
But, given my infrequent use of the modem, this won't play a part in my purchase decision. I wil just pick up the USB modem, and have it available for the rare occasion that I need modem access on one of my systems.
I have never actually used the FW800 port on my PowerBook. Mostly because disk enclosures with FW800 are not as common as FW400 enclosures.
So, I have mixed feelings on the lack of FW800. It was something I had planned to use, when I found supporting devices. But, it's something I can live without pretty easily.
I think the omission on the "MacBook" had more to do with the Intel chipsets available, and its capabilities, rather than a choice to eliminate them.
The modem is a similar situation.. 95% of the time I use wired ot 802.11 networking. But, in a pinch I have had to use dialup. It would be nice to have in there. Their tiny USB modem is a good compromise, but it's yet another gadget to carry in my bag.
Yes, but any reasonably designed system (a system developed in an open process) would surely include printing paper copies of every ballot, which could be validated by the voter and used for manual counts.
How you're taxed also depends on what type of stock options you have, Incentive Stock Options (ISO) or Non-Qualified.
Execs are given (give themselves) Incentive Stock Options. They can excercise them, and sell them at a later date. If they hold them for a year before selling them, they are taxed as long term capital gains.
Rank and file workers are given Non-Qualified stock options, which must be reported at exercise time. Your profits on that stock option sale are taxed as normal income -- so, it pushes you up the tax bracket and inevitably gets taxed at a much higher rate than 15% LTCG. (Back in the Internet glory days, I was fortunate to get some stock option proceeds, and with Federal Tax + California State Tax, I got to keep about 50% of the profits.)
Either way, stock options proceeds are nice.. It's just that "The Man" gets to hold onto a lot more of his money than the rest of us.
This is great.. I hope Diebold takes a strong stand here, making it obvious to even the most non-technical person that closed voting system, and Diebold specifically, is a really bad idea.
Openness has proven very useful for software development.
History has also shown it to be very important for government.
Combine those two together, and the importance is even more drastic. Openness and transparency in voting is essential.
I like the idea of having the "Tier 2" story listings. But, having them fragmented below each tier 1 story seems inefficient to me. There is no way to check them at a glance. You must cycle through all the stories, reading the snippets below each... very slow going.
Placing them in one of the sections on the right-hand side seems like a better way to me (where the 'older stuff', category overviews, or advertisements usually are).
Exactly.. Using a virtual machine is a lot less painful than rebooting into another OS. VMWare will be a great option to run those few Windows-only apps I need occasionally. Especially with a dual core system, VMWare should run very well, while neither side will suffer too much (assuming you have enough RAM).
Once VirtualPC or VMWare are available for the MacBook, I will be selling my current PowerBook and getting one. Go for the 120GB disk option, and upgrade the RAM to 2GB, and this should be a really nice machine.
Also, wasn't the Intel CPU used in the MacBook supposed to have some new virtual machine hardware support? I wonder if this will offer any improvements in VirtualPC/VMWare.
That article was useless.. Who cares what hoops he had to jump through to get his particular hardware working. He chose the hardware poorly, making it difficult to set up. This is not relevant to the Home Media Center topic at all, and if anything makes the reader hesitant to use Linux for this purpose.
Relevant topics would have been:
- MythTV: provides an excellent media center interface, on par with anything for Windows or MacOS. It provides features that the others can't/won't provide, such as autoamtic commercial detection/removal, transcoding, etc.
- HDTV integration: Receiver cards, Over-The-Air vs. QAM Cable options, etc.
- Xine, vlc, mplayer - capabilities, strengths, weaknesses.
I use MythTV, and I find it to be great. But, DVD playback on Linux I find to be pretty poor. I want a full-screen DVD player, controlled via an IR remote, which can handle VIDEO_TS directories on a file server (not the actual disk). MacOS X's DVD player is better than the Linux options, and there are many better Windows options (like TheaterTek).
Wow, all of those cases were huge. My preference has always been to put the minimal possible system connected to my display device, and put all the storage and other backend hardware in a cheap beige-box somewhere else.
With MythTV, this works great. The backend houses the disks & receiver cards, the frontend just does display output, and they talk over the network.
Some people have set up cool mini-itx type systems for the frontend, using either flash storage or network boot, to get the MythTV front end in a small quiet form. A really cool project is MythRoku, which runs the MythTV frontend on the Roku HD Media Player (Linux based, embedded MIPS platform with hardware HD decoder). It's small and silent, and fits in well with home entertainment devices.
My Mac Mini would also make an excellent MythTV frontend.. If Apple would get a fucking clue and enable an API to the MPEG2 acceleration hardware on the GPU. Without that, it doesn't have the horsepower to do HD display/decoding.
I think a killer app for this thing would be GPS Navigation. It supports bluetooth, and already works with the various bluetooth gps receiver options.
It just needs a good software package, like the TomTom software available for several PDAs and their own Linux based device.
Navigation systems are becoming more popular. A device that combined good nav, with wifi / www functions would be very interesting.
Did I just miss it, or were they absolutely no references to the clock speeds of any CPUs in the article?
The cpu speeds have hit a plateau for the last couple years. (Yes, I know about the P4->PM core changes, but even considering that, clock speeds have been stagnant).
Will the changes to 65nm and later 45nm enable 4GHz++ clock speeds? Or, is all this multi-core talk implying that Intel will be "building out rather than building up"?
Anyone kow of any efforts to get this working on MacOS?
I am currently using OpenLDAP, which is fine if you're willing to make the effort to learn the details and differences of OpenLDAP. Fedora DS would be much easier to manage, extend the schema, etc.
I went through this same process when putting together a system for my MythTV box.
MythTV allows for your frontent (display system) to be seperate from your backend (receiver cards, storage, transcoding - commercial removal, etc.). So you can make a big, cheap, powerful, loud system to do all the heavy lifting, and make a scaled down front-end as quiet as possible.
But, if you need to put them all in one box, you should consider power/heat in all components. Here are the main points in mine:
- Athlon64 CPU. Lower power requirements in general, and Cool 'n Quiet feature to slow down the processor, make it much better than Intels.
- Large Heat Sink + Fan. A large copper Zalman HSF runs very quiet. In my system, with cool 'n quiet enabled, the fan actually turns off most of the time it's not doing heavy lifting.
- Good case, designed for quiet operation. The Antec Sonata has a fairly quiet power supply (the newer unit has the single large fan on the underside of the PSU), and a large case fan. The large fans run slower/quieter and still push a lot of air.
- Quiet HDD. I prefer Seagate Barracuda. This used to be hard to find, but now it seems most HDD manufacturers are making quiet drives with fluid bearings. The Antec case has rubber connectors where the HDD attaches to cut down on vibration noise. If you can use network file storage, using a 2.5" drive will cut down even more on power/noise/heat/vibration and size issues. (Taking it even further, some people use a flash based system, or network boot, to eliminate spinning disks completely).
- Fanless Video Card. The Nvidia FX5200 can be found fanless from many places. It supports MPEG2 acceleration in Linux (XvMC) and works well with MythTV.
Throw a Hauppage PVR-500 Dual SD tuner card in there, with a couple HD3000 cards from http://www.pchdtv.com/ and you've got a great MythTV PVR.
That's a mobile chip? 90W power dissipation?
That thing will toast your testicles for sure.
I think I'll stick to my PowerPC @ 15W.
The small size is half the point. It is called Mini, after all. There is nothing crippled about it, it is quiet, compact and powerful enough for anything but gaming.
With my Mini, using external firewire drives and/or network drives is more than sufficient. I definitely would not want to trade off the small size, low power, low heat, and low noise of the current design just to have more internal storage.
We all know how reliable Think Secret is with there "inside info". This looks like another case of ass-talking.
Some of their quotes from this article just seemed silly.. "It is similarly unknown whether Apple will scrap the 2.5-inch hard drive currently featured in the Mac mini in favor a standard 3.5-inch hard drive". WTF? Have they seen a Mac Mini? A 3.5" drive would require a completely new, much larger, case. Also, 3.5" drives account for 10W+ more power/heat, which is a no-go in the tiny confines of the Mac Mini.
Ever since the x86 announcement, people have been speculating that the Mini would be one of the first to go Intel. I don't see this.. Even the Pentium-M processors can't go as low in power/heat as the PowerPC G4's. The extremely small space of the Mini tells me that it would be the last to go x86, not the first.
Is there some value that I'm missing in this? Why does any care that some rich guy made a balloon to take him up 60K ft? Is there some practical application that he is trying to improve this technology for? Or, is he just trying to pump his own ego?
Why does this get reported everywhere / anywhere?
I am interested in this device, both for home and mobile uses. At home, it's a sort of adjunct to the home entertainment system. A limited web browser to keep up on scores/stats while watching football. Or, a WiFi based remote control for my MythTV system.
I could also see using it for mobile purposes, rather than opening my 15" PowerBook, I would whip out this tablet as a WiFi detector and casual www/e-mail checker.
In the car, I would love to use a device like this for GPS navigation. There are several bluetooth GPS units available. If a company like Garmin or TomTom would sell their software for this unit, it would make a great nav system. A 2GB+ SD card should allow enough room for map data, with space to spare for other apps.
I am interested in buying a new car, and I found this analysis almost completely worthless.
- I am not expecting the hybrid to be better economically.
- I am willing to exchange sending money to the car manufacturer for sending money to oil producers.
- I am not willing to buy a tiny economy car, to get lower overall costs with a convential engine.
Hybrid technology allows me to get a car that I want, like the Ford Escape, or Toyota Hybrid SUV; while increasing the gas mileage over what it otherwise would be. If that means I pay $3,000 to Ford, rather than $2,200 to oil companies, that's fine with me.
In some areas, like the snowy Northern states, the smaller economy cars are not a great option. I would much rather have my sisters driving their kids around in four wheel drive vehicles in that stuff, rather than small/cheap economy cars. If hybrid allows those cars to be decent in fuel efficiency, that's all the better.
I live in Mountain View, so I'm very interested to see what the offering will hold. I'll also be interested to see how wireless network access holds up on a large scale deployment with lots of users. Sharing a wireless network in a household with one to six people is easy. But, when I'm trying to access Google's wireless network along with all of my neighbors, will it withstand the load?
Google has huge bandwidth to their corporate site.. What kind of bandwidth will the wifi network have on the backend? It could be very interesting if the 802.11G wifi has a big pipe servicing it, then it becomes more attractive than my existing 3+Mbps cable service.
> I don't think you should place a price upon the value of saving civilization.
That's silly.. The goal is "saving civilization". There are many ways to accomplish this goal, a perfectly valid input into the decision process is "how much does this method cost".
Only a monopoly could have this kind of logic..
PDF has become a ubiquitous standard for sharing documents on the Internet.
Conclusion for a normal business:
We better make sure we support PDF as well as possible and make sure our users can take advantage of this defacto standard.
Conclusion for a monopoly:
Some other company has managed to carve out a tiny stronghold in our otherwise impenetrable wall of power. We must use our power to overrun this foreign code with our proprietary replica of their technology.
Yeah, that's true when talking about DVD playback. But, for HDTV playback it's not so easy..
Decoding 720p MPEG2 in software takes about 80% of my Athlon64 3200+ CPU. Using MPEG2 acceleration, it takes only 25% of my CPU, leaving CPU for commercial flagging or transcoding.
Doing full MPEG2 decoding, not just acceleration, like the VIA/S3 Unichrome chips, gives even lower CPU usage - enabling all kinds of CPU intensive post processing without interfering with the DVR.
Now, when you consider the growing popularity of H.264 (aka MPEG4.10 and AVC), and the extremely high CPU requirements for decoding it, acceleration and hardware decoding becomes even more important. Even high end CPUs have a hard time displaying high resolution H.264 without dropping frames. If upcoming CPUs can handle the task, they still won't leave much idle CPU time for handling other tasks on the PVR.
I actually have less need for MPEG encoding, because all HDTV material is pre-encoded for broadcast, and SDTV material is easily encoded using any one of the available TV receiver cards with MPEG2 encoder. But, maybe you're talking about transcoding.. I agree with that, a chip that could convert my MPEG2 HDTV material to H.264, decreasing the size on disk by about 50%, would be great.
Okay, I'm not a gamer.. So, this pretty much eliminates me from the target market of any of the new video cards. But, I am willing to pay quite a lot, for a video card that does things I am interested in. Such as:
- Video acceleration. Full MPEG decoding (not just iDCT+MC offload) for MPEG2, like the Unichrome video chips do. Full H.264 decoding is even more important, given its growing popularity and huge CPU requirements.
- Open Source drivers, with full functionality. Good Linux support, enabling all the important hardware functions of the card would be a great start (basically noone does this today).
- Silent operation. Loud cooling fans are a no-go for me.
- HDTV output - Good support for standard HDTV (1080i/720p) resolution & synch rates. Support for DVI / VGA / and Component outputs.
- Decent 3D support - enough to handle the 3D acceleration being used in GUIs, and basic gaming.
Well, that's the whole point.. you use the portable devices where/when you don't have a TV handy. Portable DVDs, iPods, PSPs and such are really nice to have on long plane flights. They're also great to keep kids occupied on long drives.
Why would you care about any of these in the context of home usage?