H/W decoding project update & price point

[CHli]

Hey Gamester17 perhaps you missed the 4# post of this thread ? :-P

[funkstar]

By the time i would be interested in this i could get a new motherboard (with PCI-e) and graphics card for about the same

[dman_lfc]

All,

Thanks for your feedback on the price point as expected I thought it too much.
The realities here is that if you manufacture anything is small volumes i.e. 200 or 500 pieces then the cost per board price is high. With that and having manufacturing locally because of these low volumes it doesn't help our cause with other options now available.

The reality is unless you're doing production runs of 5,000+ and getting these manufactured in Taiwan the price is going to be high.

As for the Broadcom option the chip itself is $40US but there are alot more costs relating to maunfacturing which has to be taken into consideration. Comparing the decoder costs to my own design I can safely say that low volumes and local manufacturing would yield the same result.

To give you an example of the manufacturing burden just to get the board made it takes at least £15,000 for three revisions of the board to gaurantee a solid h/w platform. Obviously the cost is reduced significantly after that for production runs.

I'm investigating other options however I doubt it would be less than 200 euro's even with maunfacturing in Taiwan.

DMAN

[Goose]

I would potentially consider the card if it really does all that is promised, however i wonder how much shipping would be.

BTW is the hardware semi programmable? I mean with the nvidia and ati stuff they originally only did mpeg2 acceleration but then with a change of drivers/software the same cards were able to deal with h.264. So i was wondering if some new beaut codec/format comes out could the card possibly help (with some software tweaks) If so i think you could have a real winner here.

Secondly could it do post processing on the image itself perhaps? Think of ffdshow setting like xsharpen and postprocessing but on the card itself.

[igalan]

Aren't new Graphics cards supposed to be able to accelerate HD video decoding and playback? ATI HD 2400, HD 2600, HD 2900 and GeForce 8500, 8600 and 8800? It's even possible that some manufacturer sells one of them for AGP. So what's the point of adding another card that costs even more and does less?

dman_lfc, I appreciate the effort you're doing to help bring HD content to a broad audience of Media Portal users. But the whole point was to make HD more accessible to more computers without having to invest much in new hardware. Building custom hardware seems too expensive unless some major player wants to invest and mass distribute them.

[dman_lfc]

Originally Posted by igalan

Aren't new Graphics cards supposed to be able to accelerate HD video decoding and playback? ATI HD 2400, HD 2600, HD 2900 and GeForce 8500, 8600 and 8800? It's even possible that some manufacturer sells one of them for AGP. So what's the point of adding another card that costs even more and does less?

dman_lfc, I appreciate the effort you're doing to help bring HD content to a broad audience of Media Portal users. But the whole point was to make HD more accessible to more computers without having to invest much in new hardware. Building custom hardware seems too expensive unless some major player wants to invest and mass distribute them.

Yup

DMAN

[dman_lfc]

Originally Posted by Goose

I would potentially consider the card if it really does all that is promised, however i wonder how much shipping would be.

BTW is the hardware semi programmable? I mean with the nvidia and ati stuff they originally only did mpeg2 acceleration but then with a change of drivers/software the same cards were able to deal with h.264. So i was wondering if some new beaut codec/format comes out could the card possibly help (with some software tweaks) If so i think you could have a real winner here.

Not to the level you're refering to, no. Potentially supporting varying container formats - yes. New codecs - no. See the other thread.

Originally Posted by Goose

Secondly could it do post processing on the image itself perhaps? Think of ffdshow setting like xsharpen and postprocessing but on the card itself.

Not with the current design, typically this implies more cost.

DMAN

[player-x]

dman have a look at this maybe a other solution
http://www.sigmadesigns.com/public/P...30_series.html

A other option is maybe to talk whit a company like Terratec and develop the board together whit them they have a mouths bigger retail outlet then MP also a talk whit other (commercial) HTPC project's (Myth, beyond, ect) if they are willing to support something like this can also get the price down.
Like you sad the price go's down whith Nr's

My to cents

[infinityloop]

Originally Posted by Gamester17

BCM70010/BCM70012 chipset is priced at under $40 each in high volumes

$40,- when you buy 10.000 samples.

but i have to agree, i was about to post something regarding this device

*ducks and runs for cover*

[player-x]

dman have you stopped going down the road using this path because i still think this is a good option for people how have low spec system (AGP based)

And 100/150 euro card is still even a good option and even for people that have a up to date system
A low GPU/CPU option is good to prevent noise pollution in your living room if you have a 8800GTx system