Although Blu-ray bothers those at Apple, it seems like this format will be in our lives for a long time. Thomson’s graphics card Firecoder Blu focuses specifically on HD systems. It is also the second graphics card that carries Toshiba’s SpursEngine chip.

The same chip of Toshiba is used in Sony PlayStation 3. This chip speeds up the decoding of MPEG2 and MPEG4 AVC/H.264 codecs depending on the hardware and adds some rendering capabilities to the graphics card. Thomson claims this card converts AVCHD files to MPEG2 and MPEG2 files to AVCHD in up to five times faster than currently available.

All good so far, but this card is currently only available in Japan It retails for around $539. It will start to be sold in the USA in December.