Higher Rez (Or Bigger) Screen

[Loon]

I have a feeling that I'm going to want to watch tons of videos on my pandora, but svideo quality doesn't exactly cut it for me. (don't kill me) Ive heard that the dsp core currently isn't working, and until then, HD video will be impossible. So I guess my question is: how hard would it be to put a higher Rez display in the pandora?

Having watched a couple of 480p videos on my Pandora I can assure you that the quality is stunning on such a small screen.

 

[palmertech]

I have a really nice 5.6" 1280x800 LCD panel sitting right in front of me cloning the display from this laptop (Working on a head mounted display prototype). Driving it via DVI through an LVDS encoder, it looks absolutely amazing. When you cram a tons of pixels into a display this small, you literally cannot see the pixels! The iPhone 4 is a similar DPI, just smaller and lower res.

It looks less like an LCD than a bright, vibrant glossy photo print, but MOVING. If someone made a PMP with this rank of display, I would buy one incredibly fast.

To make this on topic: Yes, 800x480 is not the best, but it is reasonable. That said... I would kill for a Pandora with a DPI of around 300 or so.

 

[Prometheus]

It looks less like an LCD than a bright, vibrant glossy photo print, but MOVING. If someone made a PMP with this rank of display, I would buy one incredibly fast.

That's how the Pandora's screen looks to me, funnily enough. Since it uses the same screen as the Archos 605 WiFi, there's the PMP that uses it.

 

[DrCJBoduma]

[SOLVED]

Spoiler

http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/2918/rimg0614.jpg

Spoiler

http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/6528/rimg0615.jpg

Spoiler

http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/5210/rimg0621.jpg

 

[WizardStan]

[SOLVED]

uh... 8 points for creativity?

 

[Padd3r]

edit: Just to be clear, what exactly will the dsp core do on the pandora? (Besides encoding video)

Decode video.

Any sort of signal processing can be done with the DSP. Things like audio/video (de)compression are typical, but it can also be useful for things like image or audio (ie speech) recognition, pattern matching, and special effects. It'd be useful for handling the midi emulation currently performed on the CPU by timidity which would free up cycles for DosBox, for example.

Wait wait wait wait... Maybe I'm just getting hopeful, but with some probably tricky coding, you could get the DSP to function kind of like a video card's processor in a PC?

 

[WizardStan]

Wait wait wait wait... Maybe I'm just getting hopeful, but with some probably tricky coding, you could get the DSP to function kind of like a video card's processor in a PC?

Depending on what you mean by "video card's processor"
If you mean the GPU, suitable for assorted 2D and 3D transformations, then we've already got one of those. It's pretty sweet.
If you mean... nope, no idea what else you could mean
No seriously, what do you mean? What specifically do you do with your video card on the PC that you want to do with your Pandora and I could tell you if the DSP could (conceivably, in the hands of the right coder) be used to do that.

 

[Blue Ion]

Wait wait wait wait... Maybe I'm just getting hopeful, but with some probably tricky coding, you could get the DSP to function kind of like a video card's processor in a PC?

Depending on what you mean by "video card's processor"
If you mean the GPU, suitable for assorted 2D and 3D transformations, then we've already got one of those. It's pretty sweet.
If you mean... nope, no idea what else you could mean
No seriously, what do you mean? What specifically do you do with your video card on the PC that you want to do with your Pandora and I could tell you if the DSP could (conceivably, in the hands of the right coder) be used to do that.

Graphics card and DSP have very little in common, with the exception of the video decoding that the modern ones have, but that's because the graphics cards themselves got a very specialized DSP for video decoding (UVD for Ati, for example).

DSP are good for processing long streams of data sequentially, whereas the graphic card are made to process lots and lots of small pieces of data an code.
In fact, graphic cards are hard to write for due to its highly parallel nature, people are struggling with to make programs that use 4 cores, imagine with 512 .

Graphic cards might be able to decode hd video in realtime, but only the more powerful ones and consuming much more power than a dsp. They even suck when encoding video, trading off A LOT of quality when trying to encode h264 at a decent rate.

So... I'm too curious about what do you mean.


Also, the SGX in the pandora is extremely far from a power house that are the HD5870 or the GTX480. Its architecture is tailored to render graphics (tile based, where it hides as much as possible from the scene to render as little as possible, even less than the aftermentioned cards). Bypass its only strong point to calculate raw data and you end with a very sucky processor.

 

[Padd3r]

Wait wait wait wait... Maybe I'm just getting hopeful, but with some probably tricky coding, you could get the DSP to function kind of like a video card's processor in a PC?

Depending on what you mean by "video card's processor"
If you mean the GPU, suitable for assorted 2D and 3D transformations, then we've already got one of those. It's pretty sweet.
If you mean... nope, no idea what else you could mean
No seriously, what do you mean? What specifically do you do with your video card on the PC that you want to do with your Pandora and I could tell you if the DSP could (conceivably, in the hands of the right coder) be used to do that.

Graphics card and DSP have very little in common, with the exception of the video decoding that the modern ones have, but that's because the graphics cards themselves got a very specialized DSP for video decoding (UVD for Ati, for example).

DSP are good for processing long streams of data sequentially, whereas the graphic card are made to process lots and lots of small pieces of data an code.
In fact, graphic cards are hard to write for due to its highly parallel nature, people are struggling with to make programs that use 4 cores, imagine with 512 .

Graphic cards might be able to decode hd video in realtime, but only the more powerful ones and consuming much more power than a dsp. They even suck when encoding video, trading off A LOT of quality when trying to encode h264 at a decent rate.

So... I'm too curious about what do you mean.


Also, the SGX in the pandora is extremely far from a power house that are the HD5870 or the GTX480. Its architecture is tailored to render graphics (tile based, where it hides as much as possible from the scene to render as little as possible, even less than the aftermentioned cards). Bypass its only strong point to calculate raw data and you end with a very sucky processor.

That. Makes a ton of sense to me. Just for getting this' sake, the DSP would suck as a GPU because its architecture is wrong, which would make it really slow and even worse than the ~120 MHz GPU the Pandora has now. Phew. Well then if the DSP processes alot of data sequentially, could it be used for (hypothetical, and I have no idea why anyone would want this to run on their Pandora) a specialized decoding program using constant math to say, put a special encryption on a file. So pretty much, would the DSP do math?

 

[typs lik dis]

yea

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

I think you're a little confused. The TV out cable is capable of Svideo only, but the Pandora's display is 800x480 which is just a tad bigger than 720p.

Just want to emphasize that this is wrong. If you want to express it in television jargon, Pandora's display is a widescreen 480p.

Or you could call it "Enhanced Definition" Widescreen.