In short, why does the the TV doesn’t need a fan to cooldown and PC requires one while dealing with high definition videos?
In: 1359
Video decoding can be done one of two ways, hardware(specialized hardware circuits) and software(raw computing power).
A lot of less powerful devices(Compute wise, so TV, cellphone, Roku and Amazon hardware boxes, cable boxes likely) are using hardware decoders, as in chips(or portions of a processor) made specifically to accommodate certain types of videos(or more accurately, their ‘codecs’).
Generally, hardware decoders are going to be for codecs that are older. Newer codecs are going to need to be ran on software.
It’s sort of like emulating old console video games. The old consoles were hardware based engines, specific circuits designed for specific data processing, that do little or nothing else.
It can take a lot of resources to emulate old hardware in software because CPU’s and GPU’s are made to be flexible, they can’t be as efficient as dedicated hardware unless they also have access to those hardware circuits….
Some computer components used to have some of these specialized circuits for older and very mainstream formats/codecs, but I don’t know if it is still the case on the very latest cards.
Apparently, something serving that dedicated purpose *is* on current gen cards from AMD.
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From here on is more expansion if anyone is interested in specifics or examples, sorry for the formatting, I can’t be assed:
https://www.amd.com/en/products/graphics/amd-radeon-rx-7800-xt
> Supported Rendering Format
> HDMI™ 4K Support
> Yes
> 4K H264 Decode
> Yes
> 4K H264 Encode
> Yes
> H265/HEVC Decode
> Yes
> H265/HEVC Encode
> Yes
> AV1 Decode
> Yes
> AV1 Encode
> Yes
Last gen’s 6500
> Supported Rendering Format
> HDMI™ 4K Support
> Yes
> 4K H264 Decode
> Yes
> 4K H264 Encode
> No
> H265/HEVC Decode
> Yes
> H265/HEVC Encode
> No
> AV1 Decode
> No
I don’t know if that’s because it is a lower end card, or the rate at which different codecs take to become mainstream. H264 has been around a very long time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Coding
>Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding.[2] It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distribution of video content, used by 91% of video industry developers as of September 2019.[3][4] It supports a maximum resolution of 8K UHD.[5][6]
>Version 1 (Edition 1): (May 30, 2003) First approved version of H.264/AVC containing Baseline, Main, and Extended profiles.
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