Next Gen Amiga&MorphOS need Next Gen DCTV or Graffiti

[Hammer]

amigadave wrote:
With the SAM440ep and EFIKA and likely their successors to have power saving SOC systems that can't compare to the raw power of traditional PC's and Mac's,

One should add ARMv7 (e.g. Cortex-A8) with 128bit Neon SIMD. These PowerPC CPUs doesn't have instruction set for SIMD.

 wouldn't it be nice to have a new DCTV or Graffiti that could output HDTV 1080i resolution video or it's visual equivalent at a fraction of the resource requirement.

Could the technology that was used in the DCTV be extrapolated to make it output HDTV?  I realize that modern graphics cards do most all the work now, but it seems that the SAM440ep and EFIKA could still use some serious help in displaying HDTV movies and animations.

And to sweeten the pot, create an upgraded DCTV Paint to go with it too.

Edit:  Or do we just need DivX or Quicktime codecs ported to AmigaOS4.1/MorphOS2.1?

The old DCTV methods wouldn't help with pure math based compressions formats e.g. H.264, VC1, MPEG-2 and Advanced Access Content System (AACS) decryption. Refer to hardware H.264 addon cards.

The mobility Radeon 9000 supports MPEG2 and resolutions beyond 1080p.

An 68030/25MHz could playback full length movies from a decent SCSI hard disk without any problem.

Was the content MPEG (VCD) based?

I remember my Amiga 3000/030@25Mhz barely decode MP3 in real time, let alone VCD MPEG.

[Hammer]

PowerPC has a pretty decent SIMD instruction set called Altivec. It's better to build the next OS4 machine with a cpu that supports VMX/Altivec than using foreign cpus

The context was for SAM440 and 5200.

Why use crap looking MPEG full of artifacts when you could show a nice and clean animation without artifacts?

Compression ratio ~6:1 for DCTV...

ATI Radeon X1300/X1600
Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1).
Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions.

ATI Radeon HD HD 2600/3600/4550
Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)

H.264/AVC includes lossless compression as well as lossy compression.

[Hammer]

If the built in GPU of the SAM has hardwarde HD decoding, or you can add a GPU that does then the fault lies with the Software/graphics card drivers

AMD K8 Athlon 64 2000+ @1Ghz + ATI Radeon HD 3200 was unable to playback H.264 1080p Blu-Ray (includes AACS decrypt).

Unlike NV's Pure Video 2(PV2), ATI's Unified Video Decoder 1 (UVD1) doesn't accelerate AACS stage. Purevideo 2 adds a bitstream processor (BSP) and enhanced video processor (VP2) to completely offload AACS-decryption and H.264-decoding.

The latest variants are PV3 and UVD2.

[Hammer]

Yes, I noted that modern graphics cards are far more capable than the DCTV and Amiga graphics were/are, but can a SAM440ep with your noted Radeon 9000 play 1080p movies from hard disk without dropping frames or losing sync with the soundtrack?

Is it MPEG 2 based @1080p video? Does software stack support Radeon's MPEG2 decoder?

[Hammer]

Fab12 wrote:
AmigaDave,

Neither Efika nor Sam are able to play a 1080p h264 file (and far from it). You'd need some 1.5/2GHz G4 to do so, or a dedicated processing unit.

Was it playing it back via a divx(12Mbps) format @1080p on MPC8610?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BT1299hgI0