[mythtv-users] Sigma Designs X-Card

[Joel Anderson]

> On Tue, 2003-12-16 at 19:25, Dale Weber wrote:
>
> > Of course, the PVR/350 has the encoder and decoder in one card, but you
can't
> > use both at the same time.
>
> Sshh, don't tell it. Mine doesn't know this and is doing it very happily
> at the moment ;-)
>
> > The X-Card only costs $99.00 to get a second
> > decoder with the necessary Y-Pb-R outputs to drive an HDTV directly.
>
> It DECODES divx? Or is is CPU decoding and hardware scaling?
>

It seems to do something like using the (stolen) XviD codec to transcode
internally, if that makes any sense.  Also the minimum system requirements
are 200Mhz+ amd/intel processor, so it would seem to do all or most of the
hard stuff.  TomsHardware did a review of it last year
http://www17.tomshardware.com/video/20020621/index.html, and on a Duron 650
it used about 10% CPU.

Of course this is all fine and dandy for Windoze, but I found it quite
interesting that although the X-card FAQ states that there is no plan to
support the Linux OS, but there _is_ a Linux SDK available for PVR
development using the same decoder chip (EM8475) - complete with device
driver.  Of course there is some cost and NDA to deal with there too.  There
was also some mention of this on the slashdot link that someone else posted
earlier.

Hope someone besides me thinks this is interesting.  If not please ignore!
;)

Regards,
Joel Anderson