BillyG, the following from that article you posted is pretty darn bullish after one reads it a few times (I need to do that sometimes). The author seems to be taking a tone of skepticism with the power and flexibility of DVexplore. I think he was surprised himself by the power of CUBE's chip.
Why do MPEG-1 encoding when you can have MPEG-2 for almost the same money?:
C-Cube claims its MPEG-2 video encode/decode chip, DVxplore, has
been making deep inroads into the consumer market as a crucial engine for
new classes of digital devices. C-Cube secured a design slot in NEC
Corp.'s GigaStation digital optical video recorder, based on the Japanese
company's proprietary Multimedia Video Disc (MVDisc) format.
Additional notches in the C-Cube gun are ATI Technologies Inc.'s
ATI-Video Wonder add-in-board, designed to turn a PC into a digital
VCR, and JVC's new-generation D-VHS.
The chip vendor also worked with South Korea's Samsung to develop a
DVD-RAM-based recorder that was demonstrated in Seoul this week at
the Korean Electronics Show.
Tim Vehling, director of marketing at C-Cube's PC/Consumer Codec
Division, claimed that among all the MPEG-2 video encoding solutions
available on the market today, "Nobody has been able to match the feature
set of our DVxplore." The Sparc-based, real-time-capable programmable
MPEG-2 video codec can also transcode DV digital video streams to
MPEG-2 video streams on the fly.
Using C-Cube's DVxplore features, both NEC's GigaStation and ATI's
Video Wonder add-in card offer frame-accurate editing features in addition
to time-shifting capabilities. JVC's D-VHS and NEC's optical-storage
solutions also provide an interface to link their systems with a DV-format
digital video camcorder, allowing the transcoding of video streams from the
DV camera to MPEG-2 video streams to extend recording time and
enhance picture quality.
Key silicon components of the DVD recorder prototype Samsung showed
at the Korean Electronics Show were C-Cube's DVxplore MPEG-2
codec, C-Cube's ZiVA-3 DVD playback chip and TI's 54X DSP.
Real-time stream
DVxplore encodes the incoming video stream in MPEG-2; TI's audio DSP
provides audio encoding. DVxplore then performs AV synchronization and
multiplexing, and generates a real-time read/write stream compliant with the
DVD Forum's DVD specification for Video Recording (DVD-VR).
ZiVA-3 is used for DVD audio/video playback and is capable of a wide
array of playback trick modes. It offers Dolby Digital/Pro-Logic audio
decoding, DTS digital output, DVD navigation, content scrambling system
(CSS) and karaoke capabilities.
In turning its DVD player into a DVD recorder, "Samsung's engineers
didn't need to redo any software development, because they already use
the ZiVA chip in their current line of DVD players," said Vehling.
The prototype DVD recorder allocates 8 Mbytes of DRAM to MPEG-2
encoding and 4 Mbytes of DRAM to MPEG-2 decoding. System memory
requirements would range up to 8 Mbytes, according to Vehling. |
