As you all know, downloading files from usenet leaves you with two sets of files.. The rar files from what you're downloading and the par2 files for incomplete file repair.
If anyone has attempted to download anything in the 8GB range, you'll find that well.. if you're missing enough parts of the file, the par2 recovery can be a painful, painful process taking up to three hours in some cases.
I'm sick of it.
So, here's the idea. Use a FPGA to do the reed-solomon decoding to accelerate the PAR2 repair/recovery process. The system should utilize a USB connection to pipe data directly from the disk to the FPGA that will do the offboard processing of the data. The data transfer should be controlled by an application on the computer.
Second Problem..
The XBOX 360 doesn't play x.264 and all the good movies are in x.264. Converting from x.264 to h.264 could be done offboard on an FPGA because it takes for-ever to complete on my system (8 hours). This should have the same premise as the previous issue, minus using a x.
264 decoding core and possibly directly converting it to h.264 or doing a decompression-recompression..SPECS: The development system i'm using is the XILINX ML-505 board with the Virtex 5 chip. This is a open-source project being done for fun and learning btw.
Suggestions / Comments / Complaints?