@KimmoK

Quote:

And/or as it seems that mpeg HW of modern GPUs are under NDA that we can not overcome, we should go for our own...

Not to dwell on this too long, but yes.

We chased WMV9 just in time to get something that played it (sometimes NOT well), just in time to end up....
chasing h264.
We're surely not going to win this race by coming up with faster h/w that, in turn will have to chase the next codec. No more new ones you say? No need?
Think again. h264 is all about bandwidth, and the demands for that grow and grow.

Imagine a download site with high quality files that have Amiga in the codec name. Sure, there's a tradeoff in compression vs file size...
But how many times...seriously how many times when someone complains about file size do we hear "H/D space costs nothing these days. It's a non issue".
Well, in order to not be a hypocrite that reverses that argument when we talk about A/V, then explain to me why we don't pursue quality?

#6

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@Cod3r

So while you're playing with your 400MHz device surfing optimized-for-mobile websites and downloading tens of gigabytes of mpeg1 and 2 because you can't play the heavier codecs, the rest of the world will wonder "what's the point?".

Yes, we all agree an OS can be booted up on a limited device, but it's just not gonna cut it to access the content (be it media, games or productive applications) that other people use.

Opened any huge pdf's lately? Like, say, the MPC5121e reference manual? Let's see a movie of you scrolling around in that on your coldfire

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Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@olegil

Quote:

downloading tens of gigabytes of mpeg1 and 2

Exactly.

Why not take the iffanim standard and come up with our own based on "i" frame only encoding from mpeg2? Heh.

#6

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@number6

I can store a LOT of data but I can only use 10GB of data bandwidth per month. I go over, they cut my rate. Until the start of a new month or I end up with a favorable money-to-patience ratio and fork out more money for extra quota.

So while I could easily store a few TBs on harddisks here, it would take me decades to fill them up, OR cost me thousands of dollars of extra quotas. So I really don't see how I could survive with less CPU for decoding the more tightly packed video codecs.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@number6

You mean Motion JPEG? Yeah, that one sorely needs another wrapper format defined for it. We can still count the competing implementations on a single PAIR of hands, grod darnit.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@olegil

Quote:

You mean Motion JPEG? Yeah, that one sorely needs another wrapper format defined for it. We can still count the competing implementations on a single PAIR of hands, grod darnit.

Exactly. And I also mentioned that one in irc. If it was good enough for Amiga (VLABMotion), and Apple non-linear editors, then why is it out of favor?
Oh...because you can edit into exact fields? Heh.

#6

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@number6

so you want high-def movies taking up entire harddrives? How will you distribute this? I've already explained why _I_ personally couldn't possible utilize it due to limited bandwidth of my internet connection. Maybe _you_ personally don't have that problem, but trust me, I'm not the only one who doesn't have infinite bandwidth.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@olegil

nah. I agree with you.

I'm more concerned about us having to chase the latest codecs, as I stated above. Having our own...unrealistic I'm sure.

But given that, what is the answer to the increased demands on our h/w?

#6

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@Cod3r

Quote:

running an emulator? Hmm... that's the ideal solution?

The "ideal" solution depends on one's needs and tastes, obviously. If I had to separate Amiga users into groups, I'd come up with the following:

1. People that love tinkering with old software, games or projects but don't care about hardware: For this group, UAE is indeed the ideal solution: it's the cheapest and most compatible alternative, it doesn't require additional hardware because it runs on pretty much everything and on modern hardware it's fracking fast.

2. People that love tinkering with old software/games/projects but want the real retro feel: They don't like emulators, they want real hardware - be that the real thing produced 20 years ago, or a clone implemented using modern technology. Because they want to play old games in their living room (no PC there), because emulators don't make them feel nostalgic enough, because they're geeks and like to own a myriad of different systems etc.

3. hardware fetishists: Whatever it is, as long as it's old and has an Amiga sticker on it, it's worth cleaning, repairing, upgrading, bragging about, spending hours finding a connection problem that makes the machine unstable etc.

4. people who want to use AmigaOS (or a clone) as a real, modern day desktop OS: they would want the fastest hardware possible, and of course a version of the OS that is still maintained.

I didn't follow the whole thread, but from what I gather your offering doesn't appeal to any of these groups. No compatibility with Amiga hardware, not as fast and/or cheap as other offerings. another fork of an OS that has most drive on x86, no official branding...

What would be the target audience for your solution?

Quote:

If that was the case, why in the heck did I waste 9 months making a CF board run Aros 68k?

Because it was fun, I guess?

@Cod3r

You can run a modern web browser with 80MB. Mobile devices do it all day long without swapping.

Name one and what engine it uses. My phone has 128 MB RAM and very often browsing ends with out of memory message.

And you can watch a 720p movie (depending on its encoding) with 400mhz.

H.264 or WebM, I usually encounter these two. Efika can play 360p with some trouble. If you can do 720p encoded with one of the above, on 400 MHz ColdFire without hardware acceleration, your decoder must be very well optimized I would say...

but if you are a commercial OS on the fringe of what is considered modern you shouldn't need more requirements than freely available OSes (with open source) can offer.

If you browse operating systems, which can be run on MorphOS hardware base, MorphOS is the fastest and has the lowest resource consumption.

You can always join the team (after showing some portfolio I guess...) and show us how it should be done . You know, talk is cheap...

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RastPort

720p video on a @400mhz system? Not in the real world with any real videos you are likely to come across. My old PowerMac G3 is jumpered to 400mhz (it came to me set at 350mhz when I bought it new), and it manages 480p DVD playback only with an assist from hardware decoding.

I just put together a 1.8ghz Atom media client box for the living room that just manages 720p but only if I enable hardware acceleration in the client program (Plex).

I'm talking videos that are common and in the wild, not especially tweaked for an experiment. Even then, I'll believe it when I see it. People keep telling me my Sam440 (which I otherwise adore, so don't get me wrong) can play DVDs. Show it to me.

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@thread

To prevent this thread from going too far off-topic:
continue discussion here please about A/V

Feel free to repost your comments from this thread to the new thread, or the same conclusions anyway.

@cod3r

Respond here if you like. Just seems like we're off on a tangent otherwise.

#6

Last edited by number6 on 23-Jul-2012 at 08:20 PM.

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I don't know what phones you guys are using but mines is already a few years old and is a dual-core 800Mhz ARM with 512MB ram...

http://www.gsmarena.com/t_mobile_g2-3518.php

This thread gets more interesting by the day. Regarding video playback and the system requirements to do so, it comes down to several factors.

I am afraid that some of the replies in this thread are somewhat misguided in regards to what requirements are necessary to perform a given task.

For example, PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh computers in 1995 were fully capable of full-screen uncompressed video at 480p, without additional hardware. At that time, they were based on pre-Altvec designs like the 603 and 604. And as someone mentioned earlier, Amiga computers were capable of similar performance a couple of years earlier.

Honestly, video playback and web browsing applications do not require as many resources as some of you may believe. Yes, it is demanding on processors with lower clock rates, but it is all in the implementation.

Without giving away the ever-increasing statistic known as my age, I will say that quite a few of today's developers have no clue how to optimize performance on any platform. The focus today is on rapid application development, not optimization.

Today's solution is to bury poor programming techniques and weak implementations with more GHz and more gigabytes.

I began my programming endeavors on the Commodore 64. With a total of 64kB of RAM and a 1MHz 6502-compatible processor, I did not have the luxury to waste a single clock cycle.

I would never have worked for the companies I have, and on the projects I have, if I thought the solution for any given problem was to add a faster processor.

If the development culture would return to the ideals of the past, people would get more value from their hardware. And there would be less need for updates and patches because the software would simply work.

Playing back uncompressed video vs. handling commonly found compressed formats might be at issue here. That's what I mean by commonly found formats. A user might look to a next-gen Amiga machine, for example, and hope that it will plays DVDs or DSLR video footage or movies from, ahem, a bittorrent download. (Not condoning, just saying.) That's one reason why some of us yearn for systems with more horsepower than our svelte little operating systems can run in. It's not about encouraging bloat but extending capability.

My PowerMac G3 was current in 1999. It managed decompressing and playback of (480p) DVD videos with Mac OS 8.x and 9.x when new thanks to the decoding capabilities present on the video card. When the earliest versions of Mac OS X came out I ran those on this same machine, and support for hardware DVD decoding was not present. DVDs skipped and dropped frames like crazy. Then when support was added, playback became smooth again.

I edited compressed miniDV video footage on this same G3 machine for years, and it barely managed smooth playback. I could turn down quality settings to achieve smoother playback or rely on an external monitor fed from the FireWire camcorder and using its onboard decoding circuitry.

Perhaps the G3 or earlier PowerPC chips (1995 you say?) could manage smooth 480p if an uncompressed or especially tweaked format is used, but I'm talking about everyday uses by end users/consumers. Not a best-case-scenario experiment.

Anyway, getting long winded on this and sorry for that. But I think it's no failing in the approach or capability of the modern Amiga variants that we'd like some more power than he had in the 1990s. How that comes into play with the projects discussed in this wide-ranging thread I don't know, but there you go.

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@A.R.

Noone here doubts that computers could do UNCOMPRESSED video in the 90's.
In fact, we could do uncompressed 320x240 1 or 2 bit images from FLOPPY back in the 80's, for crying out loud.

But what does that help us with, exactly? It is not useful for anything. I don't want to download a movie on monday, decode it for a week, only to watch it on friday. That's not how I use the internet.

Sorry, but a 400MHz machine running an emulation has little appeal to users like me. A 400MHz machine running mostly without emulation (as in, PPC with optional 68k emulation) has a little more appeal (in fact, I've even got a bucketload of boards of that frequency, sadly not running OS4).

So even if a company would support "Amiga" by releasing a CF board, , many would probably not see the point, me being one of that crowd.

Minimig I understand, as it's a cycle-exact replica of the 500, and as such is an excellent way of playing the old games. UAE just doesn't quite cut it in all situations. A mix of UAE for where that is best and minimig for where that fits best would probably be perfect for me. If I had ANY time to waste on games.

But a board without the old features AND without the new features? Na-ah.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@A.R.

Quote:

I did not have the luxury to waste a single clock cycle.

And I counted color clocks to establish the positions for scan line interrupts.

Am I crazy? Heh.

#6

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@number6

Quote:

number6 wrote: @A.R. Quote: I did not have the luxury to waste a single clock cycle. And I counted color clocks to establish the positions for scan line interrupts. Am I crazy? Heh. #6

only if youre color blind...

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@Cod3r

this is a direct link to the DRAGON coldfire PCI card for the Amiga, it works but has no software other than an attempt at an emulation lib (good idea i guess but needs a heck of dev time).

http://tdolphin.org/amikrak/amizaduszki2k6/DSC01923.JPG

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@g_kraszewski

Well I installed Opera Mobile on my Sony Hazle, it even runs html5.

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