Improving FreeBSD's hardware compatibility

[John Baldwin]

On Friday 21 July 2006 02:19, Intron wrote:
> >> 3. Philips SAA 7130/7134, TV decoder
> >>    This is one of the most popular TV decoder chips on the market.
> >> The data sheet can be obtained from the vendor, just as what Linux
> >> community has done.
> > 
> > analog TV? what's that?  isn't everyone going digital?  (yes, I know
> > that analog TV will be with us for a long time due to security cams
> > and other uses..)
> 
> Do you believe that current Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon XP can process
> analog TV in full frame size and full frame rate (no larger than 767x575,
> 25 FPS, either of NTSC/PAL/SECAM) freely?

Umm, quite certain actually.  If you are ever in the US with cable, go turn on 
The Weather Channel.  If you are in a modestly large market (such as a city) 
then every frame of video you see is being rendered on a Pentium 4-based PC 
at the NTSC standard 29.97 FPS (or whatever the exact number is). :)

> Do you really believe that current Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon XP
> can process much higher bitstream HDTV?

In my experience the bottleneck is not the CPU, but bus bandwidth.  PCI-e has 
a lot more bandwidth than PCI.  PCI-e should be sufficient for HD.

-- 
John Baldwin