Samsung promises DVD-recorder by October
Perhaps the most eagerly awaited development in the history of home entertainment, a DVD recorder that can sit under your telly and work like the trusty old VCRs of today - only better! - is just a few months away. Samsung, the company which made a killing and drove the price of DVDs down with its DVD-807 and 709 players last year, is building on its success with the launch of the first DVD recorder, the DVDR-2000, possibly in August, but certainly by October. The DVDR-2000 (pictured right) will use 4.7Gb DVD-RAM storage discs, operating to DVD-VR standard, to capture up to 120 minutes (no recording Titanic, then...) of what the company claims will be DVD-quality video.
As well as the improved picture quality, of course, the recorder will offer many of the usual playback tricks, such as zooming and scanning of live action video, as well as an unexpected but nonetheless welcome facility for attaching digital (DV) camcorders and converting their output into MPEG2 for storage on a DVD-VR disc. The good news doesn't stop there, either; the player will also have DVD-Audio capability, and a built-in Dolby Digital decoder. The price is not confirmed yet, but it will almost certainly cost more than œ1,000, and probably nearer œ1,300.
Samsung's DVD innovation doesn't stop there, though. Another DVD-Audio player, the DVD-C800, is on its way for September or October, for a price of around œ500. The DVD-C800 will also feature a 5-disc changer and play DVD-Video as well.
homecinemachoice.com
---------
A refresher:
techweb.com
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 last 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. |
