I'm ready for a rally too. This is Comdex time, so we should expect to hear lots of announcements related to DVD. Some will be hype, and others will be real. Here's some repackaged old news from Zoran. I wonder how hard it is to defeat the country codes or CSS encryption in SoftDVD?
Zoran, CompCore to Sell DVD Player Software
November 13, 1997 (TOKYO) -- Two U.S.-based
companies, Zoran Corp. and CompCore Multimedia, Inc.,
said they started to sell licenses for SoftDVD, software that plays DVD
video on personal computers, to Japanese PC makers. In general,
users have to prepare the DVD-ROM drive and DVD decoder board
to play DVD video on a PC. SoftDVD eliminates the need for the
decoder board. Ron Richter, vice president of Zoran's worldwide
sales, said the software costs less than 1/10th that of a decoder.
SoftDVD is compatible with protected DVD videos, MPEG2/MPEG1
videos and Dolby digital audio. It also has a DVD navigation function to
display DVD video titles. SoftDVD runs on Pentium II PCs with
Windows95.
The two companies are targeting Japanese manufacturers of PCs, DVD
drives, graphics boards and DVD content providers. They already are
in discussions with several customers.
They also are developing a Windows NT version of the software.
Zoran is a dedicated video compression technology developer.
CompCore developed SoftPEG MPEG1 decoder software. It merged
with Zoran in December 1996.
Zoran now has a Japanese branch to communicate with Japanese
customers.
(Hi-Tech News Center) |
