A Chip That Knows A Thing Or Two!

What's most shocking when you open up the Showcenter 200 is its emptiness! Basically, there's not much to see because the processor controlling the product performs virtually all the functions. Developed by Sigma Designs, the audio and video compression / decompression hardware specialist, the EM8620L processor is a real warhorse.

Designed especially to satisfy all the demands of High Definition, the EM8620L is capable of decoding MPEG4.10 (H.264), VC-1, WMV9, MPEG-4.2 and MPEG-2. In other words, practically all the High Definition formats. It's clocked at 200 MHz. On the tag Sigma Designs point out that we're talking about a product not only ideal for multimedia platforms, but also DVD players, portable video players and HDTV. This chip can handle a whole mass of video processing. Among which we could mention Motion Adaptive Deinterlacing, Prioritized alpha mixing and programmable up/downscaling.

Networking is handled by a separate card, based on the Broadcom BCM4306 processor. This is compatible with both the WiFi 802.11b and 802.11g protocols. Naturally, if you want to broadcast video, it will be absolutely essential that your network supports the "g" standard. The Broadcom processor is used widely in Linksys products and it is said that it is (or was) also used in the PCMCIA WiFi cards provided by Free for the Freebox.