News & Rumours: Playstation 4/ Orbis *spin*

If they have to do software decoding of H.265 because dedicated decoding silicon isn't ready, that may mean the fan runs noisy.

Not a good movie viewing experience.

 

Well Blu-Ray and DVD upscales are not hardware accelerated. So the fan is noisy. At least on my orig. 60 GB.

 

Oh, I got confused with my words a bit. Yeah, 100GB for Bluray quality for 4K H.264, and 20GB for "iTunes" quality for 4K HEVC streaming.

 

Sony will in most likelyhood not have fixed function H264 decoders.

 

Why? It seems a cheap to enable video within games (PIP video chat, etc).

 

And power-efficient. There's a reason why all those cell-phone processors have dedicated video decoding blocks despite the fact that they have become powerful enough to decode in software.

 

All modern GPUs have fixed function video decoding. Shaders do postprocesses (such as deinterlacing, denoising, etc).

 

I think this depends on the definition of fixed function. The same HW can in most cases be used to decode several codecs.

 

Yes, but these decoding blocks are quite flexible when it comes to codecs. There is no specific HW that only can be used for h264 profile high 10.

 

When people say h.264 hardware, I take it as given they don't mean explicitly h.264 and nothing else! What's meant is 'logic that'll decode h.264 video', and whether it does anything else is another matter, but the important point is cheap (silicon and power draw) hardware is going to used specifically for the task for de/(en?)coding instead of having the CPU+GPU do it.

 

A fixed function HW encoder makes much more sense (you know exactly what you get and what you want to pump out). But the video decoding accelerator blocks would probably be part of the GPU....

 

Well apparently the H.264 decoding silicon wasn't available for the original PS3 design.

But if you buy a Blu-Ray player now, they're using dedicated silicon for decoding, so the players run much quieter.

If the 4K media format supports newer codecs, hardware decoders, whether a part of the GPU or in dedicated silicon, may not be ready in time for the PS4.

 

Have you read the preceding posts in this thread?

 

I really don't think it was back in 2006. That's why Bluray players back in 2006 were $1000+, they were basically PCs with Pentium 4s.

We're likely to see hardware H.264 and software H.265 decoding with the PS4. My question is did they ever bother including hardware H.264 decoding in any of the PS3 revisions? I would think that with all of the media content the system does now and how cheap fixed function silicon is, not sticking it in would be a real waste.

 

Do you actually know the difference between "hardware H.264 and software H.265 decoding"?

Also, if there is one thing Cell is good at it is decoding video.

 

Cell isn't in the PS4?

And perhaps I should have said fixed function hardware as opposed to decoding using general purpose CPUs, with the former being more power efficient than the latter.