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Gates also noted that the C-CUBE chip was available today, and at a reasonable cost ...
microsoft.com
MR. BIDDLE: Okay. So not only can this chip encode, it can also decode, and it can decode two simultaneous streams. That has some sort of immediate ramification for end users, that the first one we want to demo is playback with two streams at the same time. And here we go.
So what we're seeing right here is that video once again, but I'm going to add "Michael Collins" from Warner Brothers. We're going to stick that in the mix. And, as I said, because we're doing two streams at the same time on the system, we can start doing per pixel transitions between the two, so you're going to see here is a set of programmable phase wipes and other transitions that are only capable if you're capable of doing two streams at the exact same time. We're not switching sources, we're actually decoding both streams simultaneously.
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A system with this level of functionality would have cost about $100,000 a year ago, probably well over that, and this is going to debut at consumer price points, but what's really interesting is that we also have a DVR drive on the system.
So just to review, we took the signal, we MPEG 2 video encoded it, we MPEG 2 stereo audio encoded it, we put it down on the hard drive. Then I ran a program that turned it into DVD video format, and then we copied it down. So I'm going to pop the DVR into the system here.
So you can see this disk right here, here it is. And, as I said, we went from end to end here, and let's take a look at what happens. This is a consumer DVD video player, so we take the disk, we put it into the consumer DVD video player, and here's an act of faith. So what did we just do? In four minutes, we went from nothing, analog capture, MPEG 2, onto the hard drive, turned it into DVD video and burned it on a DVDR disk, put in a DVD video player and played it back.
MR. GATES: I'm certainly surprised to see that C-CUBE is getting that chip out and getting it out at very low price points. So this is one capability that's going to actually appear faster than we would have expected.
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