Similar to the energy flowing process in traditional heat engines, information could be considered to flow in the communication systems with the form of energy and entropy. Combining the thermodynamic Carnot machine and the classical Shannon information theory, a generalized thermodynamic MIMO (multiple input multiple outputs) communication system is established to analyze the channel capacity using forward error correction codes. Based on the concepts of freedom and entropy in the communication system, the generalized channel capacity is proposed under the thermodynamic theory. Furthermore, the relationships between the proposed channel capacity and the noise freedom and coding overhead are derived and simulated. Simulation results verify the proposed channel capacity is coincident with the classical channel capacity.