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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.

7 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. DivX codec changes by cfish · · Score: 5, Interesting

    DivX codec changes so frequently, what are you gona do, flash your card every month?

  2. Why this is important for free software users... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Real-time DivX decoder for $37 by Patrick · · Score: 5, Interesting
    A 1GHz Duron can do real-time DivX decoding for barely 1/3 the price, without chewing up a PCI slot. Why should I buy an add-in card? Lest you say, as the Tom's review does, that it breathes new life into old PCs, a 1 GHz Duron kit costs just a little bit more than this $99 add-in board, and is a hell of a lot more useful.

    Not trolling. Just pointing out that not all that glitters is worth $99.

    1. Re:Real-time DivX decoder for $37 by NanoGator · · Score: 4, Interesting

      "Not trolling. Just pointing out that not all that glitters is worth $99."

      I'll tell you why I want this: I want to build a cheap TiVO like unit. I have an old p2400 right now that's acting as a VCR using a Hauppauge WinTV PCI card and Snapstream to do the capturing. It's hooked up to a TV with a VGA input installed.

      The problem I have right now is that I cannot playback and record. Would a faster machine fix this? Err possibly. That depends. Both capture and playback are time dependent. If I had a dual proc machine available for it, it'd definitely work.

      I'm not building a more powerful box if I can just buy a $99 card and plug it into the one I already have running. As a matter of fact, I'm trying to find the info on how to buy one of these cards right now. :)

      Incidentally, if you're interested in a reason to buy one of these doodads if you have a more modern machine: I, for one, watch a lot of vids on my computer. As I said, I have that capture box acting as a vcr right now. While I'm browsing the web, I watch the shows I've capped in a little window. Unfortunately, the vids do cause little lags in my machine. If I scroll in IE, sometimes it'll lag the video. Is that something I should pay $99 to fix? Hmm I might, but I don't expect anybody else to. However, I have one more interesting twist to throw at this. I have a 13 inch TV doing nothing right now. I could place that TV right here on my desk off to the right, and the card will decode to it.

      Now that is totally cool. If I'm at my computer, it makes it trivial to pause the video or fast forward through commercials. I could see people who download lots of stuff from P2P really enjoying this card.

      --
      "Derp de derp."
    2. Re:Real-time DivX decoder for $37 by RainbowSix · · Score: 4, Interesting

      On the other hand, this allows one to build a DIVX player into some old hardware. Imagine if the board does so well that it works on a low power fanless Pentium p54c processor, Flex ATX power supply with a large quiet hard drive. Rather than having a fairly loud and possibly large duron system, this could take dumpster diving to a new level!

      There are only so many mp3 players, keychains, and paperweights that can be useful with all those old processors that people have laying around.

      This board should therefore do very well in the home-brew market.

      --
      --------
      It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
  4. Not So Interesting by littleRedFriend · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  5. Re:Can see the use of this... by Jerf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.)