< Roines writes in part> > I'm getting a chance to participate in the design of a motherboard. The board has several features including all kinds of audio stuff, some proprietary interfaces and networking support. I'm thinking of adding one more feature which is support for video decoding. > Any suggestions or even just random thoughts on the topic are welcome. Random thoughts: 1) I'd sure like to know if this computer with built-in video encoding and decoding becomes available to the public. 2) We make some products which manipulate digitized video. As a practical matter the compressed video world is a snake pit. It seems like everybody has their own CODEC. Avid, who makes many of the broadcast video editing stations, will sue at the drop of a hat if anyone attempts to reproduce theirs. Then there are all the MPEG variants. Other digitizing cards like those by Winnove, have their own hardware compression scheme. Then there are all the other "standards" that promise better compression or easier access. What all this boils down to is that there is no one standard for transferring video & audio -- and it seems like every one of the standard wannabees have supporters claiming that theirs is indeed the "industry standard." What this means to any potential product is that a hardware encoder/decoder for one standard or another becomes a straight jacked in the general purpose market or as compression techniques evolve. The ideal decoder would have it's own processor on which the user could load and run the CODEC of their choice -- easier said than done IMHO. With a private encode/decoder processor, the host computer would simply say "here's the next frame of raw video, encode it" or "here's a file, give me the Nth frame." That'll teach you not to ask for random thoughts! Win Wiencke Image Logic Corporation -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.