What ever happended to Sigma Designs

[beyoku]

So im thinking about the "olden days" and Sigma Designs. i remember when the baddest PC on the block would have one of these cards. I put one in every PC i had built. For those that may not know at one point you NEEDED a dedicated PCI card to play DVD's on your PC. Sigma Designs simply made the best one. After GFX cards got better the need dissapeared. Is there any atvantage to having one of these today? What if you had a SFF?
I really think Sigma could make a TON of cash if they come "back from the dead" with a PCI card that can process this HD video content.(H.264) - Some PC's simply will not be fast enough,. And A LOT of laptops definatly wont be fast enough(PCMCIA ??).
INQ. Test

We tested on two machines. One is am Epox barebone with Athlon XP 3000+ that we use for everyday work powered with 2 x 512 MB or Corsair PC 3500 memory and lame but passively cooled Radeon 9200 card. We needed external graphic simple as we needed DVI out for our DVI display. This machine was playing the_brothers_grimm_m480p.mov file with less than 24 FPS. I would say it was about 15 FPS while the CPU load was from 95 to 100 percent. This PC was not even enough to play standard/internet definition file. When we tried to play the_brothers_grimm_m720p.mov the same file just in High definition 720P quality we got 100 percent CPU usage and despite that we could not play the file, you could see some frame here and than, but not more than 2 FPS or even less. Totally unplayable.

Their latest card

3 Year old review of the above card.