I am a developer for a large company but I am new to video encoding/decoding. I am evaluating different video cards capable of outputting SDI. My first choice is the Blackmagic Decklink SDI because it seems to be a low price solution. I need to write a player application capable of playing a list of videos stored in a database. Blackmagic has an SDK which I understand relatively well, but these cards only take uncompressed audio video. The files that I need to play are MPEG2, and perhaps eventually MPEG4. I don't understand how to utilize a codec to get the video in an uncompressed format and pass that to the card. The API is in C so the application will be in C. I will not be using the DirectShow filters as I will likely be in a linux OS. Thanks in advance for the help.