[vorbis] Transparent Video Codec

[Corey Miller]

oops, when I first sent this I accidentally sent it to the wrong 
address, lol.  Sorry for the inconvenience, especially to the person I 
first sent the message to, lol.

*NOTE: I am answering questions asqui asked in a private e-mail about 
set top boxes.  Since it started with me talking about the use of ogg 
in a set top box project, I am posting it here, and there is some very 
relevant information I would like to discuss.  Since most of what I 
could say about it is irrelevant to this board, I answered most of the 
questions in this post, and will soon send another post that has the 
information more relevant to vorbis.  Plus, asqui, horrible apologies 
if for some reason you didn't want everyone to see this e-mail, I 
should have asked first but it's 2 AM and I need sleep.

On Thursday, February 13, 2003, at 03:14 PM, asqui wrote:

> Hey there, unfortunately I don't really have an answer to your question
> about high quality video compression. Have you made any headway on this
> yet? I'm interested to hear an answer to that question too:)
> I just wanted to say that I'm in the process of making a similar
> "multimedia server" for use in conjunction with a TV and Hi-Fi system.
> What kind of hardware are you thinking of using? I'm exploring the
> Shuttle XPC (shuttle.com) and also mini-ITX form-factor systems
> (mini-itx.com). It doesn't really need to be that small because it will
> be on the ground next to a large bookcase/cabinet type thing which
> houses the TV and Hi-Fi separates, but I'm inclined to think that a
> smaller system will generate less heat and be quieter than a standard
> ATX system.
> What conclusions have you reached about multimedia hardware for 
> "set-top
> box" applications?
>
> Dani
        Well, I've almost finished planning things out.  But a large majority 
of the software I'll be using I haven't found anything with exactly 
what I want, so I'm going to be writing it myself.  After planning out 
what hardware to get, I've noticed how steep the price was getting, so 
I decided, since chance are I won't be using my laptop while playing a 
video game, or while watching a movie, and I can easily still use the 
computer while it's doing something like playing music, so I was gonna 
use my laptop which is my main computer right now to be the computer 
being used as a set top box, also because it has really great s-video 
output.
        For the media server (that's what I'm calling it, you called it a 
"multimedia server", it's basically just a file server I'll be using 
entirely for storing media files) I didn't care about the form factor, 
and I didn't want it to be part of the set top box, since chances are 
in the future I'll either build another set top box machine for my 
other TV, I'll want to access my media quickly on all of my computers, 
and since my main computer is a laptop, I wanted that to have quick 
access to my music library, but not have put a big hard drive in it and 
not have to lug around all of my music all the time.
        Using my laptop will avoid lots of the major problems you would have 
with the actual designing of a set top box.  It's quiet, low power, 
small, and cool looking (plus the built in LCD screen which does not 
necessarily have to mirror to the s-video out can be a cool looking 
second monitor, and provide a picture in picture like function (except 
the picture would actually be outside of the picture, but still, lol.)  
But since you probably wouldn't be following the same route I am I have 
to say, set top box does not specifically mean a box sitting on top of 
the TV.  So you don't even need to have it nearby, but since I would 
assume you'd be using s-video or some other non-digital method of 
getting video to the TV, you would like it fairly close so signal 
degradation doesn't affect things.  What I would really suggest is 
getting any case, any at all, and building the computer in that, or 
putting any computer back there with enough power to decode video in 
realtime.
        If your worried about the ambient sound emitted by this computer, 
rather than trying for a smaller case I'd suggest one getting one of 
those things (I forget what they are called) that controls fans, turns 
them on and off as needed, or let's you control the fans manually.  The 
sound of the hard drive whirring is not an issue because it shouldn't 
need to spin during playback.  Either you should avoid using a hard 
drive except to store the OS and media player programs on, and use only 
DVDs and CDs for the media storage (if your OS is efficient, the 
programs should be completely cached in RAM, so during playback the 
hard drive won't need to do anything.)  Or you could follow my lead and 
store everything on a separate computer on the network.  If you have 
the money, and don't mind the limited sizes offered, there are also 
many quieter hard drives and solid state drives that are completely 
silent.  This leaves DVD and CD spinning the only issue.  I'm avoiding 
this by not playing anything directly from it's disk, instead ripping 
it to the hard drive first. Yet again you could have the player located 
somewhere else, but that seems rather inconvenient.  Even having it 
directly as part of your set top box if it's far away from you could be 
a hassle.  If I wanted nice DVD/CD capabilities, I'd probably look for 
the quietest or coolest running external DVD player.  Quiet would be 
nice, but if you had one that generated next to no heat it wouldn't 
harm it to enclose it in something to dampen the sound.
        So I've given advice on the case, the storage medium, and told you any 
computer that's fast enough to decode movies (or whatever the most CPU 
intensive thing you want this thing to do is) is fine, and RAM, well, 
not really an issue, just enough so it won't have access the hard disk 
during playback (With slower systems, it would be useful to be able to 
cache a lot of the file being played in advance, but that's not too 
important.)  The only thing left really as far as hardware goes I think 
is the most important.  The quality of what actually shows up on the 
screen.  Recently on 2CPU there was a great article comparing video 
cards that included a comparison of their s-video out performance.  
This article can be found at 
http://www.2cpu.com/Hardware/video_roundup/ and the actual s-video 
comparison can be found at 
http://www.2cpu.com/Hardware/video_roundup/qualitative_2.html  if you 
don't feel like reading the whole article, the Tyan Tachyon G9000 Pro 
was rated as the best card for output to a TV.  I believe external scan 
converters are much better at the task, but they are very expensive, 
and I don't have any experience with them.
        And finally, I am making most of the software on my own, in a separate 
post I'll probably mention exactly what I'm writing, and if you have 
any interest in using any of my software, and if so, if you have any 
features you'd like to see in it, feel free to tell me, but keep in 
mind the software may not be finished until late summer.  If you'd 
rather just download something, and have it run WELL, lol, I'd go with 
movix at http://movix.sourceforge.net/

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