good FPU needed on client?

[Samuel Hocevar]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2001, Erik Sjölund wrote:

> Now to my question: Is the vlc floating-point-calculation-intensive?

   The only piece of code to use floating point instructions is located
in the AC3 decoder. AC3 decoding roughly eats roughly ten times less CPU
than video MPEG2 decoding, so you're pretty safe with this.

> What are the advantages of having the vlc being run on the client in
> comparison with it being run on the server and displayed as x-client
> on the client side?

   There is no way you can have the server decode video for you, the
whole thing about sending video through a network is that it can be
compressed. The bandwidth needed would exceed 200Mbps.

   There is a reason why people set their MTRRs and try to use DMA
transfers whenever possible, even some PCI buses are too slow to show a
decoded MPEG2 video at full framerate, so don't even mention sending it
through a network :-)

> If the client has bad FPU then this might be better (because the
> server does the mpeg decoding)?

   This would be completely overkill, you'd better stay with average FPU
performances...

> Are there linux supported graphics card that can decode mpeg-streams,
> and in this way off-load the client?

   Not yet.

-- 
Sam.