Uncreative Labs

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I found one of these cards a few days ago. It's a full length ISA card. I believe it is a video capture and MPEG decoder/encoder. I was wondering if any of you guys might know something about it.

My guess would be that it is supported pretty well under Windows 3.1, and possibly Windows 95. What I am really curious about is to know if it will work using 3rd party software. The chips on the card don't seem to be proprietary. The big one is made by Philips...I think their decoders are pretty well supported.

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

This it:?

http://www.yjfy.com/images/oldhard/video/CT6080.jpg

Nice looking card (do you have the I/O cables)?

It has a DSP onboard and a C-Cube chip for compression (not sure if it is for encoding or decoding).

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Yeah, that's the one.
I didn't get the cables, but for the price I can't really complain. I have a bunch of stuff in my spare cables box that should do the trick though.

What I would like to know is if I should put this into my VLB Pentium or the EISA 486. Since the 486 already has a VGA board chained to a TIGA, I don't know if it's a really smart idea...

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

Put it into the pentium and add a dvd drive to it for decoding movies. I have an ISA dvd decoder I was going to use on a windows 3.1 machine for decoding movies just for the heck of it.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Are you sure it is possible to decode DVD movies with this card? As far as I am aware DVD movies are encoded with MPEG2, but this card is only does MPEG1. I heard that there actually isn't much difference between MPEG1 and MPEG2, but I don't know much about it.

Do you really have a DVD decoder for ISA? I didn't think the bus could handle it. What is the model of the card?

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

Its a Sigma Designs Realmagic Ultra. The c-cube chip is a CL450-P160 and just says MPEG decoder on it.

The ISA bus does not have the bandwidth to moved decoded mpeg2 around in real time, this card is like my PCI DVD decoder where it just overlays the decoded video into the VGA area plus decodes the audio stream. So all it would need to do is get fed the undecoded DVD stream and I am not sure what bandwidth that would need at the moment.

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

It probably is MPEG1

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Well. I am pretty upset. I heard back from the seller of the Video Blaster, and he let me know that he accidentally gave the board away and no longer had it for sale. It's disappointing, but I guess it had lousy software support anyway.

So, what's the story with these RealMagic cards? There are a lot of different models. Are their stripped down models that I should avoid? Which one is better? Ultra or Maxima?