C-Cube's 2Real encoder due this Summer.............................
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Is DVD Today 2Real to Ignore?
Stephen F. Nathans
EMedia Professional, June 1998
Copyright c Online Inc.
Looking into my editor's crystal ball, I see a cherubic-looking man with his hair tousled, his glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose, and $1000 bills carelessly spilling from his pockets. He's speaking at a lectern and seems to be talking about something important-at least important enough that someone is videotaping his speech-but his audience hardly seems to notice him, as they sit transfixed by the action on the other side of the stage. The speaker's partner in crime is dazzling the captivated crowd with an unprecedented display of technological wizardry: he's encoding, in real-time, an MPEG-2 stream from the S-Video live camera feed on the speaker. As the speaker crosses the stage to see just what's drawing all that attention, the other man inserts a blank disc in the Pioneer DVD Recorder at his side and commences to burn the video he's just encoded. Five minutes later, the crowd watches with hushed awe as a brand-new DVD-Video disc plays before their eyes.
The best thing about this crystal ball vision is that it's no dream of the future, but historical fact. It all happened March 26, 1998, during Bill Gates' keynote address at Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference and Exhibition (WinHEC 98). The latest piece in the DVD-on-the-fly puzzle is C-Cube's 2Real single-chip MPEG-2 codec, and Gates and Microsoft DVD Evangelist Peter Biddle demonstrated the technology to show, in C-Cube's words, "how digital video recordability will open new opportunities for consumer and business PC users."
But how genuinely accessible are those possibilities to the broad base of PC users? More than you'd think. While the Pioneer DVD Recorder still lists for a steep $17,000, the real-time encoding 2Real C-Cube chip, according to Biddle, should be showing up on retail MPEG-2 boards with enabling software for under $300 in time for summer 1998. That means a PC system fully equipped for real-time MPEG-2 encoding and DVD recording will sell for under $20,000 this summer, and users can expect that price to drop precipitously as the Pioneer recorder earns back its R & D and second-generation pricing starts to look significantly more manageable.
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