Battleangel | Personal

Sucks. Really. Especially when used to encode content that could just as well have been done in plain XVID. H264 isn’t that common yet though. And I suppose the end result depends on the bells and whistles used when encoding. But imagine my surprise as I discovered first hand that I couldn’t play a movie that I had just downloaded. C-c-c-c-hoppy. The CPU (Sempron 2400+) in my Media PC just couldn’t handle it. Period. Previous H264-related content (Ghost in the Shell 2nd GIG) played, but you could tell that there wasn’t much room to spare. Luckily upgraded software brought the CPU usage down quite a bit. False alarm. But this got me thinking about the longevity of this setup.
BOTTOM LINE, this is still pretty low res stuff mind you. With actual HDTV you don’t stand a chance. I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.

Googling the topic brought me to Inquirer and speculation over whether we will see a new era of specialized decoder cards. Apart from the support functions with NVIDIA and ATI. Crap. History repeats itself. Just wait until Sigma Design finds out.