Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] HDTV and the USRP

[Dave Dodge]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 04:19:54PM -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
> What are the plans to move some of the computational load over to the USRP 
> for ATSC HDTV?  As any estimate of the been made as to whether, once this 
> is done, it will be practical to view in real-time such content using a 1.5 
> or so GHz PC?  Inquiring minds want to know.

There's at least two steps: 8VSB demodulation to get the transport
stream, and then MPEG decoding to display it.  I believe the GNU Radio
stuff only handles the demodulation, and I have no idea what the plans
are for accelerating that.

Assuming you've got the transport stream, you then need to turn it
into audio and video.  You can probably handle standard definition
programs with software decoding on a 1.5GHz system.  But I'd be
suprised if you could get clean playback of high definition programs
with that.  And be warned that I've tried using an Athlon XP2400+ with
a graphics card that has XvMC acceleration, and it still didn't give
what I'd consider acceptable results.  I ended up buying a set-top box
with a dedicated MPEG decoder (Roku HD1000; runs Linux and has SDK).

                                                  -Dave Dodge