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MPEG-4 Hardware Decoder For $99

Posted by timothy on from the remote-control-included dept.

secondsun writes: "Tom's Hardware has the story. Apparently sigma designs has made a PCI card that decodes DiVX movies in reltime with little processor overhead." Under a hundred bucks, too.

3 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. Re:DivX codec changes by Sandman1971 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm assuming from statements made in the article that you install the codec in the OS, and not on the hardware (they installed the newest DivX codec and it worked fine with the board). At the price of hardware nowadays, you could buy a half-decent motherboard and 1 gig+ CPU for just a bit more than the price of this board... so I don't really see the point of buying one of these.

    --
    It's better to burn out than to fade away
  2. Re:Real-time DivX decoder for $37 by tempmpi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    True, but you also need a new board and maybe also a videocard with tv-out. The divx decoder board doesn't just contain the hardware decoder, it also contains a very high quality tv-out that is optimized for movie output: no black borders around the image and higher sharpness than average tv-outs on low-cost videocards.

    --
    Jan
  3. cool but i wonder by Edmund+Blackadder · · Score: 4, Insightful

    what the hell are you gonna use the cpu cycles for?

    CPUs are getting faster and faster, and since processor intensive tasks are getting exported to cards what the hell do you need your cpu for.

    If you are using that card that means that you are watching a movie so you are probably not doing anything else processor intensive.

    I guess there are some porfessionals that need to do processor intensive tasks in the background but thats not true for most people.

    I guess microsoft needs to work extra hard to ensure newer versions of windows soke up even moreprocessor power.