Steve,
the CERN images are not the question, because we've no audio track. There, only the sheer mass is the problem.
The real challenge are the 4K movies. This is a parallel project and located at the University. We aim for a resolution of 3840x2160, 24 images per second (cinema quality) with Dolby Surround soundtrack. But that's all easier said than done. At the moment it looks a bit bumpy on my screen, but it gets better every day. The graduates are working with full steam. Well, they are young and ambitious, they want to show what they have learned and what they have on it.
Although you can do a lot more tricky with movies, we do not get around to do decoding with the good old assembler. We do that with the inline assembler, leave the old C++ code as comment, so that we can later do migration easier (UNIX, Mac, PowerPC, what do I know). In particular, the iterations and the conversion from YUV to RGB are critical. There is no free register and all cores are running full load; the cache could well be three times as big.
On the other hand, C++ comes with a lot of unnecessary overhead. In the last few days I've often thought about not going back to the good old C. You know what you have, you do not need constructors, destructors, and you do not have to be careful about bending the This pointer by mistake. But it's difficult in the middle of the work. Some design decisions avenge later, but they take their revenge.
But fine, I let myself be persuaded by the young people to this madness project and must now cope with it. What else is left for me? It is my duty to show those young people the right way, to eliminate difficulties and sometimes to give comfort. Whining does not help, just bite your teeth together and carry on. The crazy thing is: sometimes I have bad moments, like every human being. At such moments, I always hear the old
Vince Guaraldi tune. There's also a guitar version by the great
Earl Klugh with a bit help by Vince Gill; the music starts at 1:29. Believe it or not, my graduates, who usually only listen to rap and hip-hop, find it really good and have come to the taste. That's a crazy world.
Gunther