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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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DivX codec changes so frequently, what are you gona do, flash your card every month?
Free software implementations of the MPEG standard (2,4) legally cannot be done because the MPEG standard is full of patents, usually requiring payment of licensing fees.. If hardware vendors implement MPEG on hardware, and open the specifications for it's hardware, it is possible to have 100% legal playback of these media on 100% free software systems.
Not trolling. Just pointing out that not all that glitters is worth $99.
I would rather have a DIVX hardware ENcoder. Something that allows you to rip^H^H^H make safety copies of you DVD collection in less time.
IANAL, but imagine a beowulf cluster of in Soviet Russia all your belong are base to us welcoming the new SCO overlords.
People, realise this, in a couple of years your PC architecture is going to be a CPU that delegates tasks to the dedicated sub-CPUs. Look at the 3D card industry if you want an example.
People keep saying this, over and over, for the last, oh, let's say ten years or so. And people, no matter how snottily they may say it, have always been wrong.
History in fact shows a strong trend in the opposite direction, for better or worse. Winmodems now run off the CPU. The whole "PCI" soundcard means roughly that the soundcard is just a prettified ADC and DAC on a card, with some assorted supporting circuitry. Not like an Adlib card, which did everything on board, back when a computer couldn't simulate even FM sound in any reasonable amount of time, let alone multitask. Movie decoding is moving onto the CPU, and staying there. (Three or four years ago, you had to get a hardware decoder. In another couple of years, this product notwithstanding, they'll be largely a thing of the past.)
Integrated motherboard video graphics w/ AGP directly sharing the system memory means that the CPU does slightly more work shuffling around memory in 2D mode, even for graphics cards.
The only reason graphics cards remain seperate is that our need for speed is such that the graphics card is often more powerful then the CPU; if the general-purpose CPU tried to keep up with a 200MHz Geforce 2 or 3, it's anybody's guess how many GHz the CPU chip would need. I'd guestimate around 5 or 6, running at full power, maybe more, and of course that's 100% utilization.
Upshot, this device is fighting market trends. My measly Duron 800 can encode with xvid at roughly 1/3 real time speed (everything I have is Duron-optimized courtesy Gentoo); it's only a matter of time before that gets to realtime for the majority of people.
(That would be one advantage of Linux TiVo-like software products: The ability to use DiVX, instead of MPEG, blowing away TiVo's recording capabilities.)
Decoding video isn't what needs constant updates, encoding video is. A properly designed codec will work as such. Just look at MPEG2 on DVDs-- most players can still play "new" format DVDs, without needing updates.
This card does have it place. I use mine to play out to a TV while I do other things. My friends can watch an archived movie/tv show (encoded in DivX or MPEG2), while I do other things. And the picture/sound is flawless. Other times I have used it for "VJing" at parties-- showing music videos while people dance to the music. The remote control works great, and doesn't work with just their own player-- you can get remote selector and use it to control winamp and powerdvd as well.
And, of course, if the manufacturer goes out of business, or looses interest, or doesn't support the same favor of M$ software that you want to run, you have a hundred dollars worth of junk.
Couldn't the same be said about any hardware manufacturer? I'm sure they'd have some sort of contingency plan for situations like that. But until they do go out of business, why worry about it?
Unless you're complaining about lack of drivers for other OS's (ie Loonix/BSD).. if so, I can't help you there. Most manufacturers don't want to provide support or drivers for Linux because it's not a "mainstream" desktop OS (and in my opinion, it shouldn't be; it's not ready.) Anyhow..
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
... is an MPEG4 hardware encoder for $99...
-- iCEBaLM
- The solution involving the loop cable seems slightly antiquated, since conventional TV cards use a Conexant chip, which writes the data directly via the PCI bus into the graphics card's memory. The solution from Sigma Designs does offer one advantage, however - the PCI bus is not overloaded, thus avoiding problems, particularly with older computers. The manufacturer also cuts costs with this solution.
It's not "antiquated", it's "stupid". There has never been a technological reason for this. You don't have to use the PCI bus to write directly to the frame buffer. The "vga feature connector" has existed much longer than any local bus (even predating EISA.) The BS about bus saturation is laughable -- exactly what would be competing with the PCI transfer? As for costs, that is very much a proven lie! (They may claim that it's cheaper only because the technology is already developed and they won't have to devote developer time for a new driver interface. But don't let Sigma's marketing people fool you, the silicon for that hardware overlay is not cheap and certainly not free.)Anyone who has ever dealt with Sigma Designs, Real Magic, et. al. knows very well why the external, analog overlay is there. It's there for one almighty reason: DVD CCA licensing rules. There is zero chance the decoded content can be "stolen" in digital format. Rumor has it, even the external SDRAM on the card doesn't hold the decoded data during playback. Where I live, that's called "paranoid."
I am no expert, but it seems that there are a whole lot of DivX and MPEG4-variants out there. Which ones does the card play, which ones will be developed in the future, and will the card play those? Do they provide specs for how to drive the card or do the users of Free operating systems have to reverse engineer those? Just some questions that popped up in my mind.
---
Thus spake the master programmer:
"Let the programmers be many and the managers few -- then all will
be productive."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
In particular the 8500 chip. They have a reference DVD player design, which just needs an IDE DVD transport, front panel and PSU to be up and running. And it's tiny. I like reference designs; they make it much easier for small companies to put together interesting kit that the big guys don't see a big enough market for.