Your processor has arrived  

Drool! please tell us MSRP.

VERY nice!

Tom Strade, where's the official press release on this forum?!

Yes yes yes, I wondered when something like this would arrive!

This looks so cool.. Hopefully it will be under $500..

Tom,

So, this is why Tom has been so quiet for so long.... He said he was working on something scaler related, but I had no idea, VERY NICE JOB!

Can you elaborate more on this? What kind of drivers will it need, what kind of software you created, various options, capabilities (TBC)?

I'm trying to get my web site updated in between phone calls! :)

Quick run down:

- The UI is a very cool looking drop-down menu system. You can control picture controls, processing, aspect ratio (in/out), and resolutions. The UI detects existing resolutions upon install and installs a bunch of others. It can also co-exist with Pstrip, although Pstrip is not necessary.

- We have sensitivity settings for bad edit detection and two different bad edit levels. The result is - the SiI504 is no longer faster at returning to film mode.

- We already have both interlaced and progressive running into DScaler and a trusted member of the DScaler team should be working to make it all work with 4.0 as we speak. Basically, there is an FPGA on-board that routes the 480i stream to Dscaler and/or DxVA or passes the Fli2200 480P stream to either Dscaler or our UI.

- 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.

- the PC requirements are nominal. We have it running on a cheap Celeron with 100Mhz FSB.

- The FPGA has some goodies in it as well and potential for other stuff. For instance, chroma delay in 1/4 pixel increments or a gamma lut are all entirely possible.

That is it for now. I've got to run and take some more calls.

Our dealers should be posting info on pricing and availability in the coming weeks. We haven't quite nailed it down yet so I'm reluctant to suggest pricing just yet. But you should be able to build an entire system for well under $2k IMO.

Seems like just what i have been waiting for. Can't wait to team this up with my Mike P. Radeon. If it's from Tom and Stacey likes it, it's already got alot going for it. I would buy this sight unseen.

This is a very powerfull card. Should put the HTPC back on the map.

Do I understand this correctly?
Currently I have an iScan sandwiched between my AV receiver s-vid output (for signals from satellite, 480iDVD player and SVHS VCR) and my pj.
But, lately I have been using my computer with Radeon 7500 and DD 5.1 cards for DVD playback cause the image and sound is soooooooo .... good.
Now I have decided to build a dedicated HTPC. With this new card, will I be able to scale up ALL of the above signals and manage image size, placement on the chip, color, hue, contrast, brightness etc., etc. - like Theatertek but for analog and digital signals? Cool. Please say yes and make my life easy!
When available and what price?

John

Stacey,

Have you tried one out? Can you say what you think?

Steve Goff

In a fit of pride, I'd like to point out a post I made on 10/4/01: "So can we put a full deinterlacer and scaler onto a video card? Sure! Why not? Let's just put a Faroudja chip onto the card. (Frankly that's not a bad idea!) Maybe nVidia or ATI could license the core IP from Sage."
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...a&pagenumber=2

Independently, bearcat started a whole thread on the subject on 2/26/02: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...light=faroudja

Of course, talk is cheap. Tom went out and did it. WOW! Great work! I'm looking forward to seeing it in action. Were you at all inspired by the 2/26 thread, or were you already knee deep in FPGA design, laughing that we didn't know what was coming?

Honestly, I've thought about doing this for 14 months now and there are some forum members that could corroborate this. However, it costs a lot more money to make something like this than I had ever imagined so I needed to get the company off the ground first.

Thanks for the compliment.

Nah, no need for corroboration. I can totally believe that your solid ideas predated our flighty speculations :-)

Tom,

Any plans for a version to compete with standalone scalers, aka for those who don't want a HTPC under any circumstance?

Thanks

Noah,

You took the words out of my mouth - the next step is make software bundle that'll let you play local DVDs too, and a remote control connection.

Any thoughts about ShowShifter bundle?

The card will only be sold through HTPC system integrators. I strongly suspect they will be offering prebuilt systems. ;)

Clearly, there is a lot we can do with this card and I'm sure there is no shortage of ideas. I'm listening to them all.

Only integrators, or also online companies?

Will thisa further drive down the prices of the video processors like those from KD or Faroudja??

JEff

Does this mean the card will not be available separately? I already own a nice high-end HTPC and have no plans to buy another one. I hope this is not the case as this has been what has kept me from trying a SDI based system.

The card will be sold retail as well through these dealers. But they are all planning to offer pre-built systems around the card.

That's great news. How will the picture from a component DVD output compare to the picture I currently get from Theatertek if I use the DCDI processing? Using SDI? I assume my Radeon will still be responsible for scaling the picture. Correct? Thanks for all the hard work. This could finally be the HTPC holy grail.

PS--Any plans to offer SDI upgrades to more DVD players?

Gary

Does the card introduces TBC (Time Base Correction)?.

Can anibody explain me the particular funtion of chips included in the card (Philips, Sage, Conexant, Xilinx, and the little ones)?.

Almost forget, what about european guys, it will be available for us (PAL)?.

Well, we know that the Sage chip is the Faroudja deinterlacer; the Xilinx chip is an FPGA---a programmable logic device that contains custom designed logic for the board. Tom mentioned a couple of things that the FPGA does earlier in the thread.

Not sure about the Philips or Connexant chips, but I suspect that at least one of them does the A/D conversion and signal processing for the component, SVideo, and composite inputs.

OH MY! Tom you've did a triple leapfrog on us sdi silk users. This card looks SWEET!! The scaler market is heating up, HD leeza and tom's holo3dgraph. Tom, are the component inputs 480i only... just wondering if it'll take a 1080i signal. Nevermind, just thought of the bandwidth for that.. although I've got a spare 64bit/66mhz PCI slot on my mobo. Can you imagine... 1080i through dscaler through radeon dvi or parker modified rgbhv radeon... drool. If not today.. then it'll probably on the Holo3dgraph II :).

I'd love to see a 5C IEEE-1394 connector and an MPG2 decoder for some all-digital dtheater and hdtv deinterlacing and native rate scaling to the PJ. Oh my!!

Great job! Looks like we have a winner.

Question guys. How does this board connect with the exisiting video card? Why does the existing need a DVI output?? It was mentioned that this card uses the external (Radeon, etc) card's scaling. Does this new card write directly into the Radeon's frame buffer?? (optimal solution). Could I just use the RAMDAC's RGB output on the Radeon??

This is very, very exciting news.

Do you need any help with the Xilinx code Tom? (like me! anything to get my hands on one. I've already rolled my own PCI I/F. Groveling now....)

Cary

The Philips chip looks to be an SAA7118 color decoder, a very good decoder. The Conexant chip is probably a broadcast decoder.

Am I missing something here or will this card only take 480i (optional 480p if demand is enough) on it's component inputs? If that's the case what to do with the stuff that has 480p, 720p and 1080i outputs?
I don't mean to rain on this parade and it's probibly me or I misread something? I'm sure Tom has done his homework on this and I just don't understand, but I'm not sure why I would want to take a DVD 480P output thats analog and scale it. After all it's already been through one scaling process in the DVD, converted to analog, sent to the HTPC, reconverted to digital in the HTPC then converted back to analog coming out the video card. Why would I want to do that over the internal DVD player in a HTPC where everything stays digital till you finally come out the Radion. 480i from an external DVD player in the component inputs, maybe, but I don't think I would take that over the internal DVD player.
Don't misunderstand me, I'd love to see some quality component inputs for a HTPC, but not for DVD playback. I want to attach other devices with progressive and interlaced component signals like XBox (480i, 480p, 720p and 1080i), JVC DTheatre (1080i), HD sources (720p and 1080i) or any other component source both progressive and interlaced to my HTPC, scale them if I want or just pass them through. I guess what I really want is a HTPC to act like a scaler with a DVD player built in.
Is that what this card will do??

Terry