Ways off?

German retail giant Metro Group have been testing RFID checkouts since 2006 in their "Future Store".

Last I heard, they were waiting for RFID tags to get cheaper, so you could put them even on low-cost food items.

Coincidentally, a similar program was started in Germany just this week. Owners of old cars can get 2500 Euros for scraping them, but there are strings attached:

1. The old car has to be at least 9 years old.
2. It has to have been registered to the current owner for at least a year.
3. You have to buy a new or a year-old car (so called "Jahreswagen") and it has to meet a certain emission class (Euro 4).

Of course the hope is that most people will buy a German car; the German car makers had to face a sharp decline in sales, too, if not as bad as the Big Three. The budget for the program is 1.5 billion Euros and experts estimate that it might cause 300,000 additional car sales.

That's nice and well when we're talking about desktop systems. But think about MythTV media center PCs - if you could combine an Atom CPU and a passively cooled nVidia or AMD GPU, a super-silent, HDTV capable home-grown set-top box would be possible.

Of course, an OpenCL encoder would help, too, for this kind of setup - broadcast TV encoding, for example.

According to heise.de (in German), nVidia says that OpenCL applications will run seamlessly on any gpus with a CUDA-compliant driver. Does anyone know if that applies to the proprietary Linux drivers?

If this really takes off, how long until the hardworking people from the x.264 or VLC or ffmpeg or mplayer projects can write a H.264/AVC decoder that uses the GPU?