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.

Comments

DivX codec changes

[cfish]

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

Re:DivX codec changes

[DrSbaitso]

from the link:

"A distinction should be made regarding the different Divx codecs: only films using version 4.02 or higher of the Divx codec are supported by the Sigma Designs decoder. In our test field, the recently launched Divx 5.02 codec did not present any problems. "

So it sounds like there won't be any problems, if 4.00 is a minimum, rather than the latest supported version. I'm sure someone more acquainted with video encoding can explain why this is.

but the drivers?

[uiil]

Coming from sigma designs, you can expect them to get around to releasing the drivers for it in 2008.

Why this is important for free software users...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Real-time DivX decoder for $37

[Patrick]

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.

Re:Real-time DivX decoder for $37

[tempmpi]

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.

Re:Real-time DivX decoder for $37

[NanoGator]

"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.

Re:Real-time DivX decoder for $37

[RainbowSix]

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 shouldn't be that bad

[unformed]

I wouldn't mind being flashed every month.

Actually, I wouldn't even mind being flashed every day.

I have this.

[Sludge]

I preordered one of these.

I use my software tv out for playing divx still. The drivers were shitty. (win2k fresh install) The only thing that they would have given me is the ability to fast forward and rewind with the remote control on my celeron 900.

It comes with it's own horribly skinned app, which crashes consistently on my computer.

It's still good for watching dvds. You could , in theory, throw this card into a machine that has no sound or tv out, and watch movies on your tv with it, since it provides high quality outs for both.

Note that the tv out only works for watching movies-- it's not an addon tv out card that'll let you use emulators and the like on your tv. For one of those, either get a scanline converter or tv out on your video card. I use a tnt2.

cool but i wonder

[Edmund Blackadder]

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.

Real use -- TV out, but DXR3 does it on Linux!

[Anonymous Coward]

This product is (right now) of little use, as linux support is not out there yet... But I am a little amused by the "need a 733+" idea of DiVX decoding! Xine (http://xine.sourceforge.net/ ) lets me decode fullscreen divx on a measley PII266, and with the addition of a Creative DXR3 (20-30 on Ebay), you can display anything that xine will decode onto a TV (s-video) through the card. New codec, no problem. The card simply outputs the xine-decoded information. Beautifully, I might add. And the card includes an S/PDIF coax output that functions nicely as /dev/dsp!
Just a thought, as this is a linux-friendly solution, and is completely codec independent.

(caveat --> Using the DXR3 actually re-encodes the video stream into MPEG which the card can decode in hardware. Doing so is fast (using FAME), but takes a little more oompf that a pII266. 350-400 MHZ is more then enough, however, to decode DiVX, reencode at 100% MPEG, and still act as a fileserver : )

Nice chip

[mocm]

The em847x is a very nice chip and cries out for being used in STBs. It is the successor of the em8400 which was used in the netstream PCI cards and in some STBs and which provides a great MPG1/2 decoder with a very high quality TV picture. The great thing is that some of the em847x chips are pin compatible with the em8400, so that manufactures don't have to change their layout.
The only shortcomings are that it only provides overlay for the display on your PC, i.e. no DMA into the graphics memory like most TV capture cards. That's of course because of the paranoia of the DVD consortium.
There will probably also be Linux drivers, in the same fashion as for the em8400 (closed user space and with a pass through kernel module) which is unfortunate and ill designed. That means no video4linux or Linux DVB API support (although you can probably get the latter also closed source).

Can see the use of this...

[Bollie]

Reasons why it might be useful to have a hardware MPEG-4 decoder:
1) Latency, latency, latency... You wouldn't want to miss 1 second of Baywatch just because you are compiling now, would you?
2) Embeddable solution... Look ma, no X! Just slap one of these puppies in and you can run your fav OS with high-quality TV out... assuming someone doesn't try to prevent drivers from being written for it...
3) Encoding possibility... Heck, if hardware decoders exist, hardware encoders can be built too! I just hope they wouldn't be too expensive.
4) Hiiiiiigh load... I can just see some bragging in the future: "Hey, I can play a DVD and write a CD and rip a CD and record a TV program all at once!"
5) The future... 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.

Things that might not be cool:
1) I don't need one! Nobody's going to buy this one because they can already play the stuff!.
2) Too expensive! $99 is a sizable chunk of salary where I come from. (Don't ask). I'd rather save that to invest in my next PC.
3) Not enough features! Bundled with VGA output for dual-screen, this would have been very, very useful. Bundled with TV capture, this would have been a shoe-in. Bundled with an encoder it would have been... glorious!

I'm not going to buy one. If they bring out an encoder, I will buy one!

Re:Can see the use of this...

[Jerf]

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.)

Not So Interesting

[littleRedFriend]

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.