Anti Iphone (Was Re: Some light ahead...)

[nitro]

Flemming Richter Mikkelsen wrote:
> On 5/2/07, Casper van Donderen <casper_de_dondergod at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> http://www.mesdigital.com/english/Products/product_mmsp2.asp
>>
>> I think this chip is pretty opensource since it is used in the GP2X
>
> I don't want to pay money to micro$oft for wma support, so I do _not_
> want that chip.
>
> Anyway I guess it is full of bug:
> MP3, WMA Decode & Codec : Support from Microsoft¢ç (porting Windows¢ç 
> CE.NET)
> MPEG1 Layer 1&2 Codec : Support from Microsoft¢ç (porting Windows¢ç 
> CE.NET)
> G.711, ADPCM Codec : Support from Microsoft¢ç (porting Windows¢ç CE.NET)
>
> And I do not think it is open source
I guess this one would be better, but I don't know how they distribute 
drivers. The problem with powervr is that they just provide IP. So I 
assume it depends on the manufacturers then (I'm afraid most of them are 
working in a quite closed development) :

http://www.imgtec.com/PowerVR/products/Video/MVDA2/index.asp

The bad point of this kind of chip are the limited amount of supported 
codecs, so this kind below would be better ; also because it's OpenGL|ES 
2.0 compatible ;)

"[...] Video processing for free, with the real-time programmable 
architecture providing extensive accelerated functions support for 
multi-standard video decode and encode." -- ak vertex&fragment shaders 
that seems to be extended in this chip to access other kind of resources 
(maybe a kind of fast texture wrapper around raw video blocks ?).

http://www.imgtec.com/PowerVR/products/Graphics/SGX/index.asp?Page=2

Now I think the main problem would be the price of a chip like that.

Why not use an FPGA with a bunch of arithmetic operations widely used in 
audio / video compression (eg. DCT) and write a media library that 
forward most of the job on the FPGA. I don't know if there is more 
complete solutions available, but the basic idea is here :

http://www.opencores.org/projects.cgi/web/video_systems/overview


(well I don't have the whole mailing list archived here, so it has maybe 
been already mentioned before)