[mpeg2] Re: Driver project: a new 4-channel MPEG decoder card

[Warren Young <warren@etr-usa.com>]

Allan Jacobsen wrote:
> 
> Warren Young wrote:
> >
> > The _driver_ is open source.  Only the user-mode library necessary to
> > completely talk to the driver is closed.  
>
> OK, you are right, but the driver without the library is completely
> useless.
> It does not contain anything about: bitrate, resolution, Mpeg1/2 data,
> program stream/transport stream, audio ac3/mpeg 2, audio bitrate,
> audio sampling freq. etc.....

I suppose all that could be handled in software, but at that point you'd
almost have a software decoder.  I think it much more likely that you
just feed raw blocks of MPEG data to the card and it deals with them.  

This is still completely consistent with the possibility that CSS and
microcode are in the user mode library.  Microcode's uploaded once on
board initialization, and a De-CSS operation is very easy on the CPU and
optional besides.
-- 
= Warren -- Video articles: http://www.cyberport.com/~tangent/video/
= 
= ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m