On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 12:44:43PM +0200, Ian McIntosh wrote:
> Hi All
> 
> I am currently interested in getting a PCI MPEG-2 Decompression card. I have
> just started
> looking and thought I would first try asking if anyone in this group can
> recommend one.
> 
> I am using the netbsd 1.6 release and would obviously want the card to have
> netbsd driver support (as I would prefer not to have to write a driver for 
> it).

There is no such card.  In general, video compression hardware vendors are
pretty lousy about releasing documentation.

In practice, hardware MPEG-2 decompression eats twice the PCI bandwidth 
that software decompression does, except in the case of the few cards that
do analog overlay (like the old Sigma Designs cards).  That means that
software decompression is often a win.  Have you tried mplayer?  On modern
hardware, I find that it's quite good.

Thor