If you have an older PC, a desire to watch your DVD and DivX movies on your TV, or just a strange fetish for pinning all your PCI slots with 'no vacancy' signs, then the Sigma RealMagic XCard could be the perfect component for you.
If you have an older PC, a desire to watch your DVD and DivX movies on your TV, or just a strange fetish for pinning all your PCI slots with 'no vacancy' signs, then the Sigma RealMagic XCard could be the perfect component for you. Sub-GHz DVD/DivX playback is not always fun. You know when your CPU has eaten more deinterlaced lines than it can chew when Keanu's thick'n'fast Matrix fisticuffs start looking like Muhammad Ali churning butter.
The XCard is a hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 decoder with a cornucopia of outputs to your TV and home theatre sound system. Composite, S-Video, component and even HDTV resolutions are supported at the video-end and coaxial audio output for Dolby Digital, DTS and stereo in the sound department, as well as S/PDIF inputs and outputs.
During testing this card helped to remove the system strain of software decoding, with the CPU load falling from 72% to a much lighter 24% whilst playing DivX files. Display and sound quality was completely indistinguishable from normal playback with a DVD player; even plain old composite output looked superb. None of the noise or artefacts that usually wash over images because of cruddy RCA connections were apparent.
Unfortunately the XCard is let down by an antiquated VGA solution; a pass-through cable from the XCard to your video card - not the best way, but this card is designed more for your telly than your PC.
The supplied player software is plain and unintuitive, but it did yield some nice features once the Enigma Code GUI was cracked, including a decent set of contrast, brightness and saturation controls that helped tweak any possible display anomalies. Thankfully, most functions are available via the remote, which is big, tough and doesn't look out of place on your coffee table, although the IR cable is only 1 metre long so you might have to perform couch yoga every time you want to skip a chapter.
Crisp, smooth video and full well-balanced digital sound makes the XCard a great accessory for anyone with oodles of movies and wants to watch them from the comfort of their lounge. At present, however, the XCard doesn't support DivX 5, and one of only a few shortfalls that tarnish an otherwise excellent MPEG decoder card.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012