National Semiconductor chipset (vs. Faroudja or Silicon Image, etc.) (1 Viewer)

[Steve & Karen]

What do folks know about the National Semiconductor chipset used in (among others no doubt) NAD, compared to Faroudja or Silicon Image, etc...?

-Steve

 

[Kevin C Brown]

I think that National's chip is Mediamatics (the company they bought a while ago). Unless I'm mistaken, I thought that was for audio only...

 

[Ka Yuen]

http://www.national.com/appinfo/dvd/dvdonachip.html

 

[Steve & Karen]

interesting range of brands using it...

JVC, Konka, Apex, Yamaha, Fisher... apparently NAD...and... California Audio Labs & TAG McLaren!?

-Steve

 

[MikeSRC]

Not to duplicate what I said on another forum, but I think that the Mediamatics chip is a little underrated. While its de-interlacing is not on a par with the Sage/Faroudja or Silicon Image chips, it does a terrific job with properly flagged discs where it doesn't drop into video mode often. Also, it's scaling ability is excellent, with no apparent reduction in picture quality. If they improve the de-interlacing to be motion adaptive, it would be a real winner.

Mike (aka mroll)

 

[StaceyS]

The chip is dead and has been for over a year now when they put it out to pasture. The engineer who was a big part of that chip is now working on nVidia software DVD players.

Its scaling was very good as was its ability to transcode PAL to NTSC. It also does a really good job at down converting 16:9 to 4:3.

The problem was it could never make a proper interlaced output, no matter which setting you chose. You would have to change the progressive mode, even for the interlaced outputs, to get it perfect on a given disc. There was no one settinng that worked on all discs. The other issue was that it did not offer a digital video output. (At least some versions of the Pantera.) This meant that you could not put on an external chip like Sage or Silicon Image unless you fed them an analog signal inside of the DVD player.

You will not see this chip used in future players. JVC will use Ziva5. Apex uses ESS for most of their products. CAL no longer makes DVD players. Don't really know what Yamaha is doing, at Cedia the guy claimed their Universal plyaer is using an MEI MPEG decoder. Don't know much about the rest.