Video Playback virtually impossible on Neo Freerunner? (Re:Video of Qt 4.4 on Neo1973: brings iPhone like graphics)

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

On Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:04:25 +0400 t3st3r <t3st3r at mail.ru> babbled:

> Mikko Rauhala <mjrauhal at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:
> 
> > On ma, 2008-04-28 at 09:26 -0500, Tim Shannon wrote:
> >> But isn't it still limited by the bandwidth available from the micro
> >> SD card?  Maybe I misunderstood that.  
> 
> > Yes it is. It's just that sending mpeg4 packets to the glamo takes just
> > a _tiny_ bit less bandwidth than sending entire uncompressed frames.
> > (Also the CPU will have more time to spend for doing the I/O.)
> But anyway I have to admit that n800 which has comparable resources (400MHz
> ARM11, quite big 800x480 screen with quite data slow output, SD\MMC cards
> which causes a decent load on CPU on heavy I\O, etc) is able to play videos
> with Mplayer pretty nice.Virtually any MP4 of "internet quality" plays
> well.And even lots of CD-sized DIVX movies (someone calls this "DVD rip") are
> OK without recoding, though they're wasting lots of space on card and you may
> want to re-rip DVDs with more optimal parameters set or recode (the only
> hardware cheat is hardware picture resizing which takes no CPU
> cycles).Actually, video looks quite good and I'm pretty sure that such things
> as Neo *can* play videos.At least some of them.As for hardware decoders I
> have to mention that they tend to be picky in what they're willing to decode
> and what thy're refuse to decode.Actually, n800's DSP MP3 decoder for example
> refuses to decode certain MP3 streams."True" hardware decoders are often even
> more picky and people usually hate that.Software decoders are less picky and
> willing to play much more formats and even semi-bugged or semi-damaged data
> (and once there is waste numbers of codecs on planet, you'll encounter such
> crap sooner or later).

word of warning. you may THINK the freerunner (ta02) and n800/810 are
comparable devices when it comes to video. you would be wrong if you think
this. they most certainly are NOT. very far from that. i have an n800 - i have
done development and graphics benchmarking etc. on it. i have done the same on
the neo1973 (gta01) and freerunner(gta02). though you may think they are
comparable - the video buses are an order of 4x faster on the n800 for starters
(from memory about 25m/s to the video card - and THAT was considered SLOW).

-- 
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org>