C-Cube?s chips are endorsed by Avid, NDS, General Instrument and C-Cube subsidiary DiviCom..............
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Technology Briefs
Date Posted: 9/10/1999
C-Cube slices and dices HDTV
C-Cube has developed an improved high-definition chip for video production and broadcast, it was announced last week. The new chip, dubbed DVx-HD, supports all ATSC high-definition and standard-definition compression formats and is based on C-Cube?s HD image processing technique, HDScan. Most encoding/decoding, or codec, chips handle video processing by ?tiling? the image--that is, dividing the bit rate into six equal tiles. Existing codec chips divide the 19.4 Mb/s HD signal into six individual tiles, each about 3.2 Mb/s, says C-Cube Marketing Manager Bob Saffari. The tiling technique can lead to artifacts and less-efficient compression, he says.
C-Cube?s HDScan processing divides the image into nine ?slices? that ?talk? to each other and determine the bit allocation based on the amount of data present in each slice, says Saffari. This creates more ?uniform, crisp, clean, artifact-free images.? C-Cube plans to make the new chip available to manufacturers in the third quarter of 1999. C-Cube?s chips are endorsed by Avid, NDS, General Instrument and C-Cube subsidiary DiviCom.
DiviCom creates new SD encoder
While C-Cube is tackling HDTV, subsidiary DiviCom has developed a new standard-definition encoder, the MediaView MV45. The MV45 uses three C-Cube Dvxpert compression chips for a new noise-filtering technique called ClearMotion. ClearMotion was developed to handle the noisy analog sources that the majority of cable networks and satellite providers still use to generate compressed digital signals, says Eric Norton, director of DiviCom?s encoder product line. ?ClearMotion is motion-compensation filtering during the encoder process that differentiates noise from motion,? Norton explains. He expects the new technique to greatly improve encoding efficiency. ?We think for a lot of customers, this will give them an extra channel per transponder. ? There are a lot of noisy sources that take up a lot of bits.?
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