Atmega to act as (or control) an HD media decoder?

Other Hardware General Electronics
1

I was just asked if it would be possible to store an HD video (.mp4 or .mpeg) on an sd card and build a circuit to decode the file and produce HDMI output with audio?

Does an atMega have enough capability to do such processing? Or are there any decoder ASICs that the atMega could control?

I would imagine the circuit I requires would need a processor connected to some RAM and an SD card for buffering data into RAM and decoding the file to uncompressed digital image/audio data which is sent to a separate set of components that format the data to HDMI and drive the outputs??

I have never worked with compressed video data or hdmi protocol so it's possible I could be way off..

I was really hoping to find an ASIC to make things simple and one thought was to just use a RaspberryPi as a prototype. but I need to think big picture and would really enjoy learning more about HD video processing!

Thanks for any insight,
cheers.

2

megaBlocks:
Does an atMega have enough capability to do such processing?

No.

I would imagine the circuit I requires would need a processor connected to some RAM and an SD card for buffering data into RAM and decoding the file to uncompressed digital image/audio data which is sent to a separate set of components that format the data to HDMI and drive the outputs??

Also known as a Raspberry Pi, which you already know about.

3

An ATmega microcontroller definitely does not have enough power to decode any video file.

But is quite capable of showing static images read from an SD card to a small color TFT LCD display, or even generate composite B&W video or VGA output.

As megaBlocks said, your cheapest option is to get a Raspberry Pi, the relatively new ZERO model that costs only 5$ !

Cheers, JL.