MPEG coders from Sigma Designs Company

By Sergey Demchenko, Larissa Bocharova

REALmagic Xcard decoder

All advantages of hardware decoding technology, providing high quality of the video and audio playback under minimum system requirements to computer, Sigma Designs Company uses in their own development. For MPEG-decoder Netstream 4000 a processor with clockrate whole only 266 MHz is required! The main purpose of the Netstream 4000 card is a decoding of video and audio streaming from Internet. This card supports PES (packaging elementary stream), programming and transport MPEG-2 streams, system MPEG-1streams, reproduction MPEG-4, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 streams of ISMA format (Internet Streaming Media Alliance), providing herewith maximum video resolution 720×576. The output of pictures is realized on screen of the monitor or television set. Netstream 4000 also supports the output of the digital audio Dolby Digital and DTS for transmission on decoder. At picture output on monitor the comb smoothing, appearing with interlacing scanning of the signal is realized. The disks of DVD, SuperVCD, VCD 1.0 and 2.0 formats are decoded by hardware. In kit with Netstream 4000 is the program for navigation and disk playback. There are component (YPbPr), S-Video, and composite connectors provided for picture output on TV-screen. The audio output is through stereoconnector mini-jack or digital connector S/PDIF. Netstream 4000 supports about 20 popular video servers.

For home using Sigma Designs releases the REALmagic Xcard, decoding MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and DivX streams. They are supported the videodiscs of all types and all DivX variants: from 3.11 up to 5.x.x, which are reproduced through own player Xmedia player 2.0. Xcard has such set output, either as Netstream 4000. Besides, the set provided by remote control with IR-receiver, connected to COM-port of the computer.

Material is provided by ProViS Company