When they say "for developers" they mean "for people who can afford the $1,800 this thing costs."

Canopus Corporation will release the "MVR-D4000," a hardware MPEG-1/2/4 encoder/decoder board, in the middle part of May. The price is 198,000 yen. This product is intended for developers, and a software development kit for VisualC++ 6.0 is included. The supported operating systems are Windows 2000, XP, and Windows Server 2003.

This is a PCI card which supports LowProfile, with a realtime MPEG-1/2/4 encoding/decoding engine. It is assumed that this will be used as an input device for the "MediaEdge2" video distribution system. Multiple boards can also be used at the same time.

The card features S-Video in/out and audio in/out ports. Supported resolutions are 720 x 480, 704 x 480, 640 x 480, 480 x 480, 352 x 480, and 352 x 240. The bitrates for MPEG-4 are 512Kbps ~ 15Mbps, for MPEG-2 1Mbps ~ 15Mbps, and for MPEG-1, 1Mbps ~ 1.8Mbps.



Inspired by:
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20040428/canopus.htm

News Release:
http://www.canopus.co.jp/catalog/mvrd4000/mvrd4000_index.htm