MPEG-4 Hardware Decoder For $99
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.
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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
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.