I agree. With today pc's being as quick as they are, software decompression
is very good.

However I am looking at having the card decompress to an analogue output,
like a video monitor.
In that case the PCI bandwidth should not be too large as the compressed
data is going on the
bus and not the decompressed data. I don't really want to get the
decompressed data back along
the PCI bus.

However if even these cards are also hard to come by then I may have a bit
of a problem.... :-)

Ian

----- Original Message -----
From: "Thor Lancelot Simon" <tls@rek.tjls.com>
To: "Ian McIntosh" <ianm@cat.co.za>
Cc: <netbsd-users@netbsd.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 4:36 PM
Subject: Re: PCI MPEG Decompression Card


> 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
>