CineMaster (now cifePEG) C3.0 H/W decoder card

[ToonGal]

I spent the last 2 days fixing my neighbor's laptop, installing a desktop, installing a wireless network, and wiring / installing his new DSL. As "payment", of which I only expected a "Thank you", he gave me his old Dell Dimension XPS T500 desktop. Nothing too fancy as a machine, but it had a TV-out, so I decided to make it a SageTV Client. Reformatted out of Win98 (what a mess that old computer was) and into my house-wide O/S Win2k SP4. All went well quickly enough, and I have a new dedicated desktop sitting next to my Sage server.

Here's the interesting part. The box is loaded with cards all connected to one another with no obvious meaning to them, pre removal, but I saw a card with RCA and S-Vid TV-out jacks attached to the graphics card. Turns out the card is called a "CineMaster C3.0" and enables DVD playback to a TV without interrupting the VGA output. (It's what I imagine a PVR-350 to do.)

It took a while to get all the updated drivers for this (and the other unidentified cards), but that's now done. I've been able to get the DVD player (bundled w/ the card's driver) to output to the TV, but have not found a way to make any other program, Sage included, to do the same. Is this possible? Anyone have any insight or other ideas? I'd hate to be this close and have to resort to yanking out my old 3dfx Voodoo3000 to get TV-out on this box, especially since the DVD card would go to waste.

Links from my research:

Current H/W config (machine in question = "SLAVE"):
http://toongal.superherokicks.com/HTPC/system.html

Specs / pix of CineMaster C 3.0:
http://www.pennskog.com/cinemaster/hcmc30_info.htm

cifePEG card home page (bought and relabelled CineMaster card line)
http://www.cifelli.com/cinemaster.htm

CineMaster history:
http://www.pennskog.com/cinemaster/hardware.htm

Thanks for any help / ideas!

[mls]

Many years ago, before computers were fast enough to handle software decoding... There were several hardware DVD decoder cards put out with DVD drives to allow playing DVD's.

The often routed the computer video and the DVD card video thru one another with various cabling hook ups.

If the card shows up in the SageTV setup listing as some type of Video out device/decoder... it might work, but you would most likely not get the SageTV OSD.

For the most part though, I doubt that SageTV supports that card at all. Heck, their still working bugs out of the PVR-350 support (and that's the only one they "officially' support even if a few other hardware decoder cards may work with SageTV).

[kny3twalker]

there is the additional video/audio filters properties

maybe with graph edit you could find the name

but not sure

[ToonGal]

Wow! Two responses w/in less than an hour! I'm tempted to quote the immortal words of William Shatner on SNL, but I refrain.

While I've been waiting for various reboots, I've been reading more on the card, and this was about what I expected. On a (minor) 'good news' note, I swapped the Diamond with the 3dfx and the CineMaster seems to still function on the drop of the 3dfx. They weren't listed as a compatible vendor, but I figured why not. Was going in storage otherwise anyway. Now I have a H/W DVD decoder card working on the same system w/ my TV-out.

The dream lives. As football season approaches, I will have two SageTV desktops with output to my P-in-P TV. Should probably upgrade the TV to a 'real' one, but having too much fun recycling all my old junk.

Thx again for the help mls & kny! Happy weekend all!

[ji0005]

I will be very curious to hear how you end up with the old Dell. I happen to have basically the same machine sitting near a TV, mainly used for emailing, web surfing, etc..

Ive been considering a media MVP rather than putting money into the old machine, but if it could work...

[tcdrake]

Hey Toongal, how did you make out with the CineMaster?

[DFA]

ToonGal:

I have some fair experience with the CineMaster HW decoder card. I had bought a couple of them from ebay and did some experimentation. I modified one to work just like the XCard / PDI arrangement. Not sure if you are familiar with this but in short, the digital output from the decoder is given to the input of a Conexant BT878 based capture card at its GPIO pins (9 - wire connection). From there, the video is handle by DScaler to be rendered. I had to do board-level mods to the Cinemaster to get a hold of the correct signal. I think that is about all these cards may be good for since they have no VGA output of their own and there is no feature connectors on modern day video cards that is needed by the Cinemaster.

Furthermore, althought the drivers for the Cinemaster are WDM, no one ever developed a Direct Show filter for this card. That is why you will not find it listed as an available decoder by Sage. Too bad. I actually thought the PQ was better from C-Cube based Cinemaster than the Sigma based XCard when I compared them in PDI usage. On the other hand, the XCard supports DIVX / MPEG4, requires no mods for PDI usage and has a direct show filter.

So there you have it.

DFA