New PCI video processor card, w/ Faroudja deinterlacing

[Steve Goff]

I though you folks might be interested in this: http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/newsf...rd-7-2002.html




Steve Goff

[JonMarsh]

Pretty interesting!

This would be a good way to integrate my Laser Disk player with my HTPC, and would probably provide excellent playback of video sourced material from a STB DVD player- if only there was a way to use the DVD stream from the computer and run it through the Faroudja chip. Still, as long as it will full screen scaling to any resolution the video card supports (I understand this handled by the video card, anyway), then this might be pretty interesting.

OTOH, I wonder how the video quality will compare to using a Radeon board and software player that supports DVXA? At least there shouldn't be any micro stutters or other issues due to processing sound at the same time, and re DMA performance of the DVD drive.

Thanks for the heads up!

Regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[SteveG]

They already have plans for more inputs, on a separate card, and DVD playback. Here is a quote from Tom Strade, head of Imersive:

"We already have a daughtercard with more inputs. Essentially, it is a small card with 4 BNCs and another s-video inout. Each BNC can be configured as you see fit. So it could be 4 SDI's, 4 composites, etc. This will be cheap since there are not chips on the daughterboard - thus the big header on HOLO3D to allow connections from external feeds in both analog and digital.

- We could also do a 480P input board if demand were there. Also, an MPEG DVD card is about to be tested. So the DVD drive in the PC would stream MPEG to the decoder card, the bt.656 would be fed via cable into HOLO3D, and then our UI would have transport controls to render/control the DVD playback. "




Steve Goff

[SteveG]

Apparently, the card is the work of Chris Coley and Spencer Shanson, and perhaps Paul Chambers. According to Paul, "Chris and I first worked together at Philips on the DVX-8000. Chris worked with Spence at ReplayTV (and had worked with him before that). I used to work at TiVo, and am the 'proud father' of the original Philips Pronto (TSU-1000). All three of us are English ex-pats, two of us with front-projection home theaters."




Steve Goff

[Lex]

What the heck is in Ex-pat?

Interesting.

Lex

[JonMarsh]

Ex patriots. Living here from another country.

Well, this all sounds very interesting, particularly the support for an MPEG hardware DVD decoding (which if done right wouldn't be hard to adapt to ATSC HD stream,), etc. This might wind up being a very attractive solution compared with the std. video boards and software players. Hopefully it can play to the strengths of the best video cards (scaing and output video quality), and be flexible enough to work with your choice- whether ATI, Nvidia, or Matrox.

Regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[Wireless]

Can't wait to see this one! I've gone through three capture cards trying to find one that would pick up less noise and this may be the one.




John
My HT Picts

[SteveG]

The card uses the latest Philips color decoder for analog inputs. It is a very low noise device, with 9 bit A-to-D coversion. It then converts the signal to 10 bit before sending it to the FLI2200. The other chips would allow for custom processing, such as compensation for horizontal and and vertical chroma offset and gamma lookup tables. A very interesting design, with several benefits.




Steve Goff

[Bing Fung]

NIce.. !

So the reason of using this is to scale external component outputs through your HTPC?

Please explain it to my dumb ass, I've been on holidays too long and forget even my name :LOL:




Bing

[JonMarsh]

Yeah, Bing,

This is a fancy way (and seemingly well egnineered) to add video input with high quality de-interlacing (for film or video source- the latter being the bane of software DVD players) to your HTPC- then the native video card is used for scaling and display.

The coolest thing about this is that it can accept component and SDI video as well as the more plebian composite and S-Video.

This would be a great way to put a higher "ease of use" factor into an HTPC- even if the DVD quality isn't quite as whiz bang with an external player as the best on board deocders for film (purely speculation), it would have siginificant ease of use advantages for the rest of the family. You could route a conventional DVD player and Laser disk or Sat into this card; then for the geek factor, have a PC HDTV card like a HiPix or MyHD also in the PC- as well as a software DVD player - but ma and the kids would only have to deal with a conventional STB player if that's where their comfort zone is. For anime and other video titles, it would probably be the way to go, unless ATI or others actually get their special de-interlacing stuff for video to actually work.....


Regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....