Sigma Designs Xcard support

[Morten]

Hi,

I suppose this post is mainly directed towards frodo :-)

How much thought have you given supporting the Sigma Designs XCard?
If the answer is; yes, I'd love to, but I don't have a XCard to develop on...

Then my question is, how big of an insentive would it be for you to code the support(in a timly fashion hehe) if I provided the card for you?

-I'd also like to say that I love MP, been running xbmc for a long time on my xbox, so it feels natural to use MP on my HTPC :-)

Regards,
Morten

[Mars Warrior]

Assuming you mean this card: http://www.sigmadesigns.com/products...ifications.htm,

It seems "just" a very good videocard with great features, but without any inputs or MEG2 ENcoding, so nothing MP should support...

Or am I missing the point (as it is VERY, VERY, VERY late)??

I’m not sure I understand this correctly since I’m only recently discovered MP. But wouldn’t it be great with excellent video output even for MP? I bought an xcard after seeing a HTPC from a Swedish company, http://www.hembiopc.com/Evolution_preinfo.htm , at the Scandinavian Technical Fair in October delivering the most impressive picture quality on a TV I’ve ever seen built on an xcard for scaled RGB/S-video/component out. The possibility to use the HW decoder to play Divx/Xvid/DVD with minimal processor load is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

Originally Posted by Mars Warrior

It seems "just" a very good videocard with great features, but without any inputs or MEG2 ENcoding, so nothing MP should support...

Or am I missing the point (as it is VERY, VERY, VERY late)??

Its not a video card actually, its a dedicated MPEG decoder. It has hardware support for a bunch of MPEG formats including MPEG1, MPEG2, and a number of MPEG4-based codecs like Divx 3, Divx 4/5, and Xvid. I can attest that it does do a fantastic job of displaying them on a TV. Decoding other formats is a little tricky, unfortunately. 8 Dimension's player TVEdia (formerly JovePlayer) gets aroud this by re-encoding unsupported formats into MPEG on the fly and sending them to the card. I'm not sure if the Media Portal devs are willing to use such a kludge of a trick to support the card. Furthermore, I don't think SigmaDesigns has been forthcoming with an SDK or details about their API, and I doubt 8 Dimensions will help, considering they've pretty much got the Xcard market cornered (Sigma's own player is pretty sad). It'd still be great if you did, though. I love my Xcard, and would really like to use an open/alternative product with it, especially since TVEdia's been getting slower with every release.

I was just about to start a new thred about the XCard, but Morten ran a little faster than me.

In my opinion it is a "must" that Media Portal can handle and support XCard + SweetSpot as a combo. As far as I know, Xcard is the ultimate MPEG Decoder, which gives the best possible picture. Only TVedia can support XCard, this is not fair. Media Portal has a very great potential, so to make it as one of the best Media Centers around, it must be able to support these cards. Also, as far as I can se, when I look around in all the "forums" - the future within HTPC`s is Parallel Digital Interface = PDI
and Seriel Digital Interface = SDI, http://www.pixelmagicsystems.com here you will se a lot of what I`m talking about.

I hope we are getting the worlds best Media Center !!!
Regards KOMM

[Morten]

So the big question is; Who is capable of programming this support?
I do program, but it's beyond me to implement this...
-But I'll make a great beta tester :-)

Anyone?
I'll even resort to begging

When you enter Media Portal from the homepage, one of the first things you se is: We want you!! Register!! because, thats the only way to get knowledge about Media Portal. I became a member few days ago, and until now, I`m quite impressed about the product, all the guys have made,- a wery good job, indeed !! Media Portal deserves a lot more customers.
TVedia is a wery popular Media Center for one reason !! They support Real Magic XCard - as the only one on the market. So - a good way to
get more customers into the "store" is by integrating support of XCard,
and thereby demand the best possible picture on the screen, which we all want.
Morten started the thread - DON`T WASTE IT !!! If some of you out there are software programmers, and got the time, Please give a hand,
to make Media Portal worlds best
Regards KOMM

[MrMario64]

you guys have any dev docs for these cards?
As we do not have them it's hard to make support for it.

Lets hope a dev with this card comes on board.

[Morten]

This might be usefull:
http://www.sigmadesigns.com/products/RMP4_download.htm

//Morten

Originally Posted by Morten

This might be usefull:
http://www.sigmadesigns.com/products/RMP4_download.htm

//Morten

That's just a video encoder (ripped off from Xvid at that).