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Expect DVD Chip Price Wars

Posted by timothy on from the we-join-this-war-already-in-progress dept.

prostoalex writes "With more companies developing the chips for DVD players the price wars might ensue. According to this DigiTimes report, 'Boosted by rising shipments, the higher price of DVD player single-chips is likely to push up the average chip price to US$9.56 in the fourth quarter from US$8.58 in the first half. However, the increasing number of chip suppliers also implies that a new price war may soon develop'. The predictions of DVD chips sales slowing down add to the expectations for price wars."

3 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. DVD Chips by Conspire · · Score: 3, Interesting

    FYI, the royalties for DVD proprietary standard are much more than all chipmakers' profits, or the end product makers' profits for that matter.

    --
    Real men don't need signitures!!!
  2. whoopee? by Phantros · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm less than excited. My last DVD player cost me $90. Yes, $90, new. How much cheaper can they get? Are they going to replace the increasingly poor prizes crackerjack boxes have had to resort to?

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    4Literature - Read, write, and discuss your favor

  3. A new factor: graphics cards decoding DVD's by MtViewGuy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think one factor that not that many people talk about is the fact that the latest generation of graphics cards can do hardware acceleration at a pretty high level (at least both hardware motion compensation and Inverse Discrete Cosine Tranform) for decoding MPEG-2 video streams from DVD movies.

    ATI has been doing this since their Rage 128 chipset arrived around 1999; nVidia's GeForce4 MX and GeForce4 Ti also do this now, and Matrox's Parhelia board do it now, too.

    In short, the market for seperate DVD decoding boards has pretty much vanished on the desktop and laptop computer market.