Sigma Designs have today opened the doors to new DVD applications today during
Comdex in Las Vegas, where the company announced its new REALmagic™ EM8221
DVD/MPEG-2 decoder chip module.

Specially designed for the use in Notebook PCs the chip can turn any
DVD-equipped notebook with a VPM-/VPE-compatible digital video interface
or a 16-bit Zoomed Video (ZV) interface into a portable DVD player with
video playback at a full 30-frames per second — without burdening the system CPU.

The chip supports MPEG standards as well as SVCD and VCD 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 in
widescreen, letterboxed and fullscreen aspect ratios, while also containing
digital and optical AC-3 5.1 outputs. The chip even supports MPEG-2 audio
decoding as well as PCM audio playback at 48Khz, 96Khz and 16, 20 and 24 bits.

Numerous Taiwanese notebook manufacturers have already eagerly embraced the chip and
will utilize them in their upcoming models.

Now Notebook users can experience the same quality level of DVD playback, which
will surely help giving DVD yet another boost.