4 ms·
A little over 30 years ago when I started working on multimedia conferencing over the Internet, for some reason we had a couple of hardware JPEG decoder ISA (?)
by mhandley 3y ago
A little over 30 years ago when I started working on multimedia conferencing over the Internet, for some reason we had a couple of hardware JPEG decoder ISA (?) cards from Bitfield Oy, a Finish company (if I recall correctly). I can't find any documentation on them now, as this predates NCSA Mosaic and the start of the web's rapid rise. Anything before about 1994 doesn't really exist online. JPEG was brand new back then, but even so it seemed a little odd, as they were actually slower than software JPEG decoding on the Sun SparcStations we were using. It might have made sense on a PC, as PCs were significantly slower than Unix workstations at the time and we looked down on the poor folks who had to use them with pity, but I'm pretty sure the market must have been small and rapidly followed the dinosaurs into extinction.
- spicyjpeg 3y agoThe original PlayStation's main SoC (which is incidentally about 30 years old at this point) included a trimmed down JPEG decoder [1] meant to be used for video playback. It still relied on the CPU to handle Huffman decompression [2], but it allowed that otherwise anemic 33 MHz MIPS core to push 320x240 video at 30fps. [1] https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/macroblockdecodermdec/ https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/macroblockdecodermdec/ [2] https://github.com/Lameguy64/PSn00bSDK/blob/master/examples/mdec/strvideo/main.c#L11-L27 https://github.com/Lameguy64/PSn00bSDK/blob/master/examples/...