Introduction

MPEG-4 Videos On Older Computers

Most video enthusiasts are all too aware of the fact that you can only play films in MPEG-4 or Divx format in full-screen mode smoothly by using a powerful PC system. So what's the point in spending entire days downloading a long-awaited movie from the Internet, only to find you can't even play it properly? After all, not everyone has a high-speed processor with a high clock speed. To ensure that just about any Divx film can be played back without image dropouts, you should use at least an AMD Athlon with 800 MHz plus or an Intel Pentium III/733. Otherwise, you will very soon encounter image gremlins or errors, particularly if the image content is complex with numerous motion vectors. Videos with action scenes are good examples of this.

The packaging for the decoder board from Sigma Designs.

The first MPEG-4 hardware decoder: PCI card with Realmagic EM8475 chip.