On Fri, Nov 23, 2001 at 02:17:02PM -0500, Paul McHale wrote: > > According to Tom's Hardware, realtime MPEG4 encoding requires > > about a 600mhz > > P3. > > Does this assume the encoding is all done in software? I would guess a > hardware assisted MPEG encoder would require much less. But I have NO idea > about this. I am just curious.
I doubt very much that a 600MHz P3 would be able to encode a MPEG4 stream in realtime. I would think a P3 600Mhz would be sufficent to /decode/ a MPEG4 stream though. :) I found a couple of references on MPEG4 on Toms Hardware so you can look for yourselves: Optimizing MPEG4: http://www6.tomshardware.com/video/01q1/010223/ Best CPU for MPEG4: http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q3/000925/ Quote: > the conversion of a four-minute MPEG-2 sequence (test object) depended > heavily on the used CPU and lasted between 10 minutes (AMD Athlon > 1100) and 20 minutes (Intel Celeron 667). Not even a Athlon 1.1Ghz managed to keep up to encode MPEG4. > > I know the Tivo doesn't have much horse power. They are case in point for a > design which is just fast enough. They appeared to have spared every > expense. It is an awesome unit. Just saying, I don't think they have a > 600MHz processor ... Could be completely wrong. Tivo doesn't use MPEG4 for it's compression to begin with. I'd guess MPEG-2 or MPEG-1 with a hardware codec. Much cheaper to throw in a custom chip that does the encoding/decoding than using a general performance CPU as a replacement. //Humming
