Any replacement for MediaMVP?

[odin4242]

Btw.: i didn't get one 

[MartenR]

I do not know yet, if I got one.
Both distributors are not seling to private customers in Germany in the moment.

One distributer said, that they are thinking about an exception and the other is a retailer, selling it to private customers (but in this case the initial batch is gone).
But I can live with 30 days, delivery time for the ones after the first batch.

Marten

[davep]

Btw.: i didn't get one 

Me neither. Still it was interesting getting up at 0545 

[odin4242]

Hey Marten,

any news concerning the pi?

[MartenR]

No, I do not have any yet. But hopefully I get one until end of June.

Marten

[odin4242]

I just placed my order at RS for my Pi, expected delivery in 3 weeks 

[davep]

My Pi arrived today   

Is there anything I can try to test whether the Pi will be powerful enough to be a Vomp replacement?

[MartenR]

 I already have one, I bought one on ebay (and it was not too expensive only 100 eur).
I am coding since last weekend, OSD and keyboard input is 80%  working .

Big question will be mpeg2 playback, since the hardware mpeg2 codecs are not activated (license fees), we need software decoding.
First test with mplayer shows insufficient performance of the cpu (50 % of speed which is needed for fluent playback),
so we have to offload some work to the gpu, which will not be too easy. (Or the foundation offers a codec pack)

Anyway first step for me will be h264 playback, since this decides most on the archtecture of vomp.

Marten

[davep]

Have you seen this site?

http://www.raspbian.org/

They are rebuilding the Debian distribution to make use of the floating-point hardware in the Pi - the build done by the Foundation uses software emulation. I don't know how much floating-point arithmetic is involved in MPEG decoding but it might help. Discussion on the new build is here:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=4256

[MartenR]

Yes, I have seen this. But the underlying ffmpeg uses already hand optimized VFP floating point code (I have checked this).
(softfp uses in fact the fpu, emulation only if not supported by hardware, only passing floating point variables using fp registers for functions is not possible)
Although mpeg and the audio stuff uses mainly integer arithmetic.
hardfp is benificial for 3D performance I assume, since there you need a lot of call function with floating point arguments (there is the performance drawback in softfp)
I plan to offload scaling yuv conversion, motion compensation and DCT to the GPU using open gl es shaders (already bought a book about it),
this should give more performance, since the GPU should be more powerful than the arm.

Marten

[Harry]

hiya!

what do you guys think?
http://apc.io/about/
$49

[MartenR]

Only "Resolution up to 720p", that is  not good.
Marten

[Harry]

funny...
the chipset manufacturer claims its capable of doing 1080p
http://www.wondermedia.com.tw/en/products/platform/soc/wm8750/index.jsp

[odin4242]

Hey Marten,

please keep up working with the Pi 
And please keep us all informed on every progress that you make.

Btw.: With the MPEG playback: is the Raspbmc able to play those vids? Maybe you can borrow some code there...

[MartenR]

Well, I am aware of xbmc-raspi, but so far as I know they only use the hardware decoder for which no mpeg2 is licensed.

Marten