Todd Ignasiak wrote:
I looked into these a while back, and I was unable to find any
standalone video cards available for purchase. With the video
processing capabilities they have, the S3 products would make ideal
HTPC video cards.
As you mentioned, the Unichrome is available integrated into many
motherboards. S3 also announced a couple new models recently, the
S25 and S27.
I belive these are PCI Express models
http://www.s3graphics.com/en/products/index.jsp but I'm sure someone
could put them on an AGP card with a converter like some of the Nvidia
cards, I think it's the 6600s that are natively PCI-E but have AGP
versions available through the magic of a little chip.
If you can find one, there are still a few questions.. Does the
driver from the unichrom project support these chips? Do the
standalone cards have the same MPEG decoder capabilities as the
unichrome?
Don't know but I'd have thought their'll be plenty of similarities
though one big difference is going to be in memory handling, I'm pretty
sure the on-board unichrome GPU uses some of the system RAM but an
expansion card model won't. As for the MPEG stuff, the specs claim
acceleration and given the man hours involved in developing such a
feature it's probably the same~ish but I'm speculating.
I currently use an Nvidia FX5200 (it's fanless, and supports XvMC
MPEG2 acceleration). But, I would like to replace it with a card
that has open source drivers.. if something is out there.
Me too, lets hope a the turnover provided by the VIA boards is enough to
stop S3 going under (as everyone on /. seems to think it will) until a
major card fab puts the chips on something we can buy and thus promote
better support for open source software from hardware manufacturers.
--
tveeprom: Hauppauge: model = 34132, rev = J158,
tveeprom: tuner = Philips FM1236 MK3 (idx = 58, type = 4)
tveeprom: audio_processor = MSP3416 (type = 14)
(new type Model 401)
model name : mobile AMD Athlon(tm) XP Processor
cpu MHz : 2277.214
cache size : 512 KB
(Plenty o' grunt on an ECS k7s5a MB)
Knoppmyth R5A16 (unmodified)
http://mysettopbox.tv/CHANGELOG.txt
MythTV 0.18.1
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