Elbox to release MPEG-2 decoder drivers for Mediator

[Acill]

Hello Mediator users,

New versions of many drivers will become available in the coming days.
The update will include new versions of Voodoo, FastEthernet, TV tuner
and Spider card drivers.

We are now busy at completing work on support for a PCI hardware
MPEG-2 decoder card. Apart from vision decoding, compressed sound is
also decoded by the hardware of this card!

The MPEG-2 decoder card requires simultaneous presence of a TV tuner
card with the SVHS input connector. The decoded video stream is sent
from the MPEG-2 decoder's card through the SVHS connector to the
TV tuner card input and it is viewed in the same way as television
(see here: http://www.elbox.com/products/tv_screens.html).

Best regards,

Support Department of ELBOX COMPUTER
Web site: http://www.elbox.com
Online Store: http://buy.elbox.com

[amigamad]

This link works http://www.elbox.com/products/tv_screens.html

[Piru]

I don't want to piss on anyone's parade, but will these cards be available from any computer store, or will it be executed like the infamous Spider USB case?

That is, will the supported card(s) be standard hw or some Elbox modified thingie with locked drivers?

[ikir]

OMG! This is a FANTASTIC

[Sparky]

It's nice to see you drivers, but why did they decide you need a TV-tuner as well ?

Implementations I've seen on "other" platforms transfers the data across the PCI bus directly to the video board, wonder why they chose this way ?

Thinking about it I did pretty much what they are doing now using a Vela board a couple of years ago, probably wasn't as reliable (as I did the software) but it did have SDI output :-)

[Trev]

Implementations I've seen on "other" platforms transfers the data across the PCI bus directly to the video board, wonder why they chose this way ?

The two most popular PC cards, the Sigma Designs Hollywood and the Cifelli cifePEG (Cinemaster), don't transfer the video data across the PCI bus. The Hollywood uses a VGA pass-through cable, and the cifePEG uses the VGA feature connector. A few manufacturers, such as Matrox, offered MPEG-2 daughter boards as video card add-ons. In most newer PCs, MPEG-2 decompression is done in software with the video card (nVidia and ATI being the leading chipset manufacturers) providing hardware acceleration for motion compensation and a few other math intensive functions.

For authoring on the PC, you're best off using a card like the cifePEG and a nice NTSC/PAL monitor. The leading DVD authoring package, Scenarist, relies on the cifePEG and the newer Sigma Designs NetStream cards for MPEG-2 decoding.

But we're talking Amiga here. . . . It sounds like hardware MPEG-2 decompression on classic Amigas is going to be an expensive hack. :-(

Trev

[Crumb]

I would prefer a more recent sigma card, like the one that decodes DivX videos...