The full-featured card may be a sensible option if: This typically comes at a 100% increase in cost, compared to cards which rely on these functions to be available in software.
Hardware mpeg 2 decoder software#
However, this is no longer the case, as VDR now also offers the VDR Software Decoder Plugin.Ī full-featured card can do everything that the budget PCI card can do, but also provides hardware DSP and MPEG2 decoding (uncompressing the received video data).
Hardware mpeg 2 decoder install#
The TechnoTrend Skystar 1.x / Hauppauge WinTV Nexus cards require that the host PC upload firmware to the card on startup.īear in mind that this naming can be deceptive for modern systems with powerful CPUs a "full-featured" card may be simply a waste of money as a recent PC with more than ~500MHz should be able to decode MPEG2 streams in software without any extra cost.įor a long time the VDR Project unfortunately forced its users to install at least one of these expensive cards in their system. While these “Premium” cards do alleviate the host system's CPU from the task of decoding SDTV streams, it should be noted that they do so at the expense of PCI bus resources – after decoding, the large uncompressed SDTV bitstream is offloaded from the card across the PCI bus to the video adapter for display. Nonetheless, despite the widening adoption of HDTV services, use of the “full-featured” tag line for these cards continues to persist, although such references are clearly obsolescent. That terminology has stuck and, since that original labeling, has continued to have been applied to later DVB- transmission services were still several years away from offering (HDTV resolutions) streams. These very first DVB devices for the personal computer were deemed "full-featured" in light of the fact that they provided essentially the same capabilities as what a dedicated SetTopBox could provide. " Full-featured" is a term that was initially adopted to describe the early Siemens, Hauppauge and TechnoTrend DVB-Cards which utilized an on-board AV711x MPEG-2 decoder chip. In any regard, two particular groups of hardware decoding PCI cards developed and are discussed below: However, this is no longer the case today, as software decoding devices have become the ubiquitous offering, although a few manufactures still produce hardware decoding devices too. Still, many individuals seemed to desire the off-loading from the CPU that a hardware decoding device offered, and, hence, this class of device remained quite common within the marketplace alongside the newer "software decoding" devices (see below). Within a few years, the increased computational abilities of the average CPU greatly diminished any real need for a dedicated decoding device. Consequently, the first DVB devices for the personal computer market were PCI cards that all featured an on-board hardware MPEG2 decoder IC (see "full-featured" or "premium" cards below).
Hardware mpeg 2 decoder tv#
As TS decoding operations can be computationally intensive, allowing the receiving device to also handle the decoding of the incoming stream effectively alleviates the need to tie up the host system's CPU with that burden and, instead, leaves the CPU free to tackle other processes.Īt the time that digital TV services emerged, MPEG2 encoded content was the norm and decoding of such streams was still significantly challenging for the typical CPU of that era. This class of DVB device features an on-board hardware MPEG decoder IC.
3 Relevance of Hardware Decoding cards Today.2.1 Historical Perspective (a.k.a "Budget" cards).1.2 (i) "Full-Featured" or "Premium" Cards.
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