[Theora-dev] Theora camera/fast computers

[Ralph Giles]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2005 at 02:35:47PM -0700, Andrey Filippov wrote:

> The most obvious FPGA bugs in the camera are now fixed and it seems to
> work rather stable (for now - just with clips, no streamer software yet).

Wow, it's really great to see this coming along. The simplified coding 
does interesting things with the camera noise. 

It's really great to see larger format footage in theora!

BTW, the frame rate is given at 29.49 fps. Any particular reason you 
didn't pick a standard number like 30 or 29.97?

> I'm now considering demonstrating this new camera that will stream
> Ogg/Theora video at the "Open Source Forum" in Moscow, Russia (April,
> 27-29, http://www.opensource-forum.ru/). And for that I'm wondering - is
> it possible to buy a right computer (motherboard, CPU, videocard) that
> will be able to  decode and render the video with the currently available
> software? Any practical recommendations?

It's not looking good. Derf's experimental decoder with Ruik's mmx 
patches (about the fastest decoder software we have) gets 7-9 fps on my 
1.8 GHz althon. With linear scaling that means the best you'd see would 
be 15 fps on a 3 GHz system. Enough to start to look smooth, but not 
complete playback. Testament to the power of hardware accelleration.

Maybe you should consider cropping the image to 1280x720? Then you can 
call it an 'HD' camera. :)

 -r