Ah, but can you play it full speed?
That is easily tested:
Lets grab Andromeda I recorded from ITV4 last night, it is a digital TV transport stream,
not modified in any way.
I will put it from the main PC into a 4GB USB flash.
We do this the Linux way, FYI:
Insert USB stick, test if detected:
dmesg
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
sda: sda1
sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sda
OK, detected, let's mount it:
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
Copy 100MB of Andromeda for test:
dd if=andromeda_x.ts of=/mnt/sda1/test.ts bs=1000000 count=100
Type 'sync' to actually flush it to the USB stick (else it stays in RAM).
sync
This takes a while, flash write is slow...
Unmount the stick:
umount /dev/sda1
Now let's take the USB stick to an other PC, my eeePC, so I can watch Andromeda on the train:
Start eeePC
Open a terminal window with ctrl alt T.
become root
sudo su -
Insert USB stick.
Ignore stupid pop up of auto mount that does not work anyways, mount by hand:
mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/sdc1 (yes disk numbering is different here)
Logout as root
ctrl D
Now here we go:
mplayer -vf scale=1200:960 -fs -vop pp=0x20000 -monitoraspect 800:480 -cache 8192 /mnt/sdc1/test.ts
Of course I already had most of this scripted, not sure you need the 'scale', the large cache helps to play fluently.
The '-vop' forces de-interlace, the '-monitoraspect' fits it to the wide screen eeePC display.
The '-fs' means full screen.
The answer to your question is YES, even on a low power low speed processor device as the eeePC.
Plays with no irregularities, sound also OK (is mp2 encoded on sat), aspect OK,
everything fine.
Picture is mpeg2 encoded and yes the eeePC uses hardware acceleration in decoding it (top shows hardly any CPU use).
And this was the cheapo 4GB USB stick.
It also shows how that eeePC can be a great movie player for for example kids in the back of the car.
Much more versatile then those (just as expensive) portable DVD players, you just copy the DVD to the
USB stick on the main PC.
So what I am saying is: Perhaps the time of the rotating media (disks) has come to an end...
I can't even play (at full speed) the 640x480 clips my camera produces,
reading off an IDE-USB card reader!
In case that is .dv, then yes the stream is made up of a series of .jpeg pictures, and used much more bandwidth.
You have to re-code it to H264 perhaps (or mpeg2).
My digital camera records directly into mpeg4 on SDcard, and plays no problem.
I suppose Flash has better rewritability than CD-RW though...
More times, yes.