Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1999 13:04:06 -0500 (CDT) From: Chris Dillon <cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us> To: freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org Subject: DVD/MPEG2 hardware decoders Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9907191242060.68800-100000@mail.wolves.k12.mo.us>
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Aaargh. I'm about to break down and buy a DVD player of some sorts. I've considered a standalone DVD player, but I would really love something that I could also use in my PC for the occasional overly-bloated game that barely fits on a DVD, let alone several standard CDs. A Toshiba SCSI DVD drive (no EIDE for me, thanks) and a Creative DXR3 decoder are about the same price as the average standalone DVD player ($300 US). Jordan at one time had mentioned talking to Creative about support for its DXR3 decoder board, but I don't remember hearing anything about it other than the initial "it'd be nice to have". Better yet (for me) would be a Matrox G400 MAX with the hardware MPEG2 decoder daughterboard, when it comes out. If it is not possible to play DVD videos under FreeBSD yet, is anyone aware of any PC based solutions that would let me simply pop a DVD title in the drive and have it begin playing via a hardware decoder without needing any kind of drivers or player software, akin to being able to pop an Audio CD in your CD-ROM drive and having it play it without software intervention? Booting to Winblows to be able to play videos is possible, but if I really wanted to do that I wouldn't have written this plea for suggestions and just went out and bought any of the available PC-DVD solutions. I have an eerie feeling I'm going to have to buy the standalone solution for now. Someone please tell me I don't have to do that, or that I wouldn't have very long to wait. :-) P.S. Will the emergence of XFree86 4.0 _really_ help to broaden our multimedia horizons where Unix is concerned, especially FreeBSD? I notice its feature wish-list is quite neat, though mostly pertaining to 3D acceleration. Will any of its new features help make using hardware such as MPEG decoders more of a reality? -- Chris Dillon - cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us - cdillon@inter-linc.net FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet. For Intel x86 and Alpha architectures (SPARC under development). ( http://www.freebsd.org ) "One should admire Windows users. It takes a great deal of courage to trust Windows with your data." To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message
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