[Theora-dev] FPGA implementation/ players speed?

[Andrey Filippov]

> Pity that it turns out being hard to decode them.

There is little sense of having a camera too fast for the regular PC. It
is not "no sense" as the video still could be archived and viewed later
(even a slower speed). But I still hope it is possible to play the video
fast enough.

> Once I figured out some approximate number
> "... 528x320 which my 800 MHz Athlon can play without frame drops."
> at 25 fps with a good margin.

Currently I do not have any motion compensation and loop filters so there
are less computations to perform than for the full Theora decoding

> I guess viewing in real time can be done by splitting decoding into
> threads
> (no idea how hard it would be with [hacking] current libtheora) and
> running
> on a dual 3+ GHz machine.

I'm not a profi in PC software design, but what about various SIMD
extensions in CPUs? Are they already used in the library?
What about memory vs. speed trade-offs? Is it possible to maximize the
speed using more memory for the decoder?

Andrey