[Ned Scott]

_ar of UTW seems to have gone for a half way position which is at least reasonable; he's stated that the 10bit release will be standard, and they'll also continue to release XVID compatibility files; however if they find the demand is still there, they will release 8bit files at a later date; although these will be post original release (likely because encoding takes time and these people must have jobs and lives away from the PC)


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In terms of hardware requirements; I think the damage isn't going to be quite as bad as people expect unless computers are REALLY pushing it on the specification side.

To see what reasonably could be expected, this evening I threw a Hi10p 720 OP sequence through MPC-HC using LAV on an old AMD X2 3800+ machine (with subs enabled which causes higher CPU usage). It actually ran with no drops, CPU usage was a little on the high side (about 70-80%) at points but it was definately playable.

Now that X2 skt939 chip is EASILY 5-6+ years old, one of the first dual core chips on the market; if it can handle 720p Hi10p video reasonably with a decent video decoder (admittedly on a not overloaded PC, but then loads of ***** running can bring almost anything to it's knees eventually), then I'm perhaps not as worried as I was that this'll cause major issues for people; most people except those using netbooks/media boxes should have something more capable than that machine; and it's not like everyone NEEDS to be able to run 1080p feeds.

But that's why I bring up this problem here on the XBMC forums. People who use XBMC aren't watching downloaded shows 2 feet away on their nice powerful computers. Video playing and casual internet usage is drastically moving to things like ARM processor devices and ATOM processor computers. It's an almost bizarre trend (in some perspectives) where we see the public actually moving in mass to slower machines that are simply more specialized for their tasks.

We can pump out hardware on a tiny board for $30 that will run 1080 h.264 High Profile. TVs are themselves are starting to support running applications of some kind (one day you probably won't even have a separate box for XBMC. It will just install on the TV.). They can do all of this because major content providers are planning on supporting h.264 High Profile for several years to come.

The trend is internet-based TV moving away from the computer. These anime group encoders can't seem to wrap their heads around that. The really funny part is that I think they would totally rethink this if they themselves experienced how nice it is to have an XBMC box, and if they knew how easy and inexpensive it was to set up.