**FYI** A message from Terry Phipps.
I sent a fax today to Mr. Terry Phipps, CEO of Phipps & Company, with some specific technical questions in regards to his video CD-ROM technology. He responded very promptly. Here it is:
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Per our conversation and the fax I received on 8/27/98 I have the following responses to you questions:
APPLE MAC8 CD-ROM sample [Frank mentioned to me that there's a complete music video on the Apple Macintosh OS 8 CD-ROM. It's 400 x 200, millions of colors, 61M in size and 4 minutes long. It uses the Cinepak CODEC - not as good as the Sorensen CODEC, but both produce better images than MPEG (but slightly larger file sizes). This would allow a 40 minute video to just fit on a CD-ROM. - Milk]:
Although we have seen the Cinepak compression and do not prefer its quality, we would still like to see the sample that you have mentioned.
1.) Is this a lossless compression? Proprietary information.
2.) what are typical compression ratios? Proprietary information.
3.) What type of processing power is required? Minimum requirements- Pentium class PC 90mhz, 16mb RAM, 1MB Video RAM, sound card. Suggested Requirements- Pentium class PC 133mhz, 32MB RAM, 1MB Video RAM, Sound Card.
4.) Is this a software only method, or does it require special drives? This breakthrough is a combination of hardware and software development efforts.
5.)Will this CODEC be available as a plugin for a browser? Perhaps in the future. Phipps interactive is currently working towards Full Screen Video for the web.
6.)Will this software work with existing multimedia systems? (I.e. QuickTime, AVI, etc.) IF the source material is already digitized and compressed with the mentioned methods, the quality of the original video will already be lost. Phipps can still provide full screen video with the digitized/compressed data, but can not recover the quality of other CODEC degradation.
7.)How exactly is this technology superior to VHS? there is no electric standard to distribute worldwide. (i.e. secam, pal, etc.)
8.)If it doesn't require special cards for playback (based on PR), it must be very CPU dependent. If the computer has a 1MB video card, a cd-rom drive, Win95-WIN98-WIN NT, and 16MB RAM the video will run.
9.) What kinds of FPS do you achieve on a typical system? Proprietary information.
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