Why Apple should let HP build its workstations

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Andrew Richards] “They both have their own playback engines. Pro Res would be out though.”

I thought ffmpeg takes care of that, sorta?

[Andrew Richards]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I thought ffmpeg takes care of that, sorta?”

Does it? For who?

Best,
Andy

[Jeremy Garchow]

Linux and Windows.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Here’s an awesome YouTube movie of it.

Don’t blink.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo2yxnXE5t0

Jeremy

[Andrew Richards]

Yeah, it can be used to support play back and transcode for a bunch of formats, but I don’t think Avid’s playback engine or Adobe’s Mercury Engine rely on it to do what they do within the respective NLEs.

Best,
Andy

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Andrew Richards] “but I don’t think Avid’s playback engine or Adobe’s Mercury Engine rely on it to do what they do within the respective NLEs.”

You mean on a theoretical Linux port?

Well, no.

Another reason that it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

But, decoding (and encoding) ProRes is possible on Linux.

[Alan Okey]

[Dennis Radeke] “We built a version of Premiere for SGI once”

I used to use Premiere 4.2 on an SGI O2. Premiere was notorious for crashing at the worst possible moments… As I understand it, it was developed using a translator tool that ported Mac code to IRIX. It did have some cool features that the Mac/PC versions didn’t have at the time, such as the ability to create your own 3D transitions that were accelerated in hardware. It also supported the O2’s built-in video subsystem and hardware MJPEG encoder/decoder. I cut quite a few projects on that system before I eventually moved to FCP.

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Richards] “[Tim Wilson] “I doubt it….but it wouldn’t matter. You can buy a Thunderbolt adapter for $150 today.”

Where? Who makes it? Have a link?”

I found 4 of ’em in less time than it took me to type this sentence. Prices start at $100. My recommendation: Matrox MXO2, which has lots of other dandy features. More than $100, but more than worth it. 🙂

[Andrew Richards]

[Jeremy Garchow] “You mean on a theoretical Linux port?

Well, no.

Another reason that it’s not going to happen anytime soon.”

ffmpeg isn’t an OS API, it is an open source reverse-engineered codec processing framework. It does include an API, libavcodec. ffmpeg is also available for OS X, by the way. I don’t know if it is used by any NLE on any platform (unless you count Cinelerra).

Adobe in particular with Mercury Engine and it’s reliance on NVIDIA is in an easier position to port (I imagine), since it is calling NVIDIA APIs and NVIDIA certainly supports Linux. It is the fact that Avid and Adobe do not rely on an OS vendor for playback and media processing that makes them good candidates for porting.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Tim Wilson] “I found 4 of ’em in less time than it took me to type this sentence. Prices start at $100. My recommendation: Matrox MXO2, which has lots of other dandy features. More than $100, but more than worth it. :-)”

I thought you were referring to some kind of Thunderbolt PCIe card for adding the interface to a PC that doesn’t have it on the motherboard.

From your previous post:

[Tim Wilson] “Yeah, yeah, I get the convenience of having it on the motherboard. , I also get why people are loathe to think about expanding their Macs — it’s a pain, and there’s so little room to grow that it would be silly to think about wasting one of those opportunities on low-grade I/O.

The Z workstations, though, have a ton of expansion options, and it’s all done without. No tools – not for swapping out motherboards, power supplies, RAM or anything else, including opening the box. Sure as sh^t not for something as simple as adding Thunderbolt.”

That is not what the MXO2 is. And to my knowledge there are no Thunderbolt PCIe cards. Intel said when they launched the technology last year that the Thunderbolt controller needed direct access to the PCH and thus could not be added as a card.

Best,
Andy