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.

Looks cool

[LemurShop]

MPEG-4 for older PCs

. To ensure that just about any Divx film can be played back without image dropouts, you should use at least an AMD Athlon with 800 MHz plus or an Intel Pentium III/733.

um right. i have a p2/500 and i can run all divx moviews flawlesly, so the "divx for old pcs" is kind of moot, isnt it?

It looks like a cool gadget none the less, but personally im more concerned by the direction the Divx project is going than what cool stuff i can do with it.

Re:DivX codec changes

[Sandman1971]

I'm assuming from statements made in the article that you install the codec in the OS, and not on the hardware (they installed the newest DivX codec and it worked fine with the board). At the price of hardware nowadays, you could buy a half-decent motherboard and 1 gig+ CPU for just a bit more than the price of this board... so I don't really see the point of buying one of these.

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.

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.

Re:DivX codec changes

[cyborch]

I must second that. This seems to be just another processor for todays computers which actually aren't needing more CPU speed... How about spending money elsewhere and get a better performing system that way? The pre-build computers I see in stores these days have 1+ GHz and 64MB RAM, why on earth would I want more processor speed in stead of 512MB RAM (for instance)?