Maybe they reread Bill Gates speech from March of this year keeping the new member of the DVx family in mind as they read it.
microsoft.com
Now, through the miracle of technology, we can see that that can become a future of the PC,
so real-time digital recording. I'd ask Peter Biddle to come out and show us how this is going to
work, how we're going to get video in as a first-class data type.
MR. BIDDLE: Thanks a lot.
Okay. What I have here for a demo is I have a Toshiba laptop and it's in a docking station, and
inside the docking station is this new chip from C-CUBE--it's an MPEG 2 encoder/decoder chip,
and plugged into that chip, we have an actual video feed from one of the cameras back there.
We also have a Pioneer DVR drive connected to this system.
And what I actually just did is when you were over there on the couch, I took a feed from that
video camera, and we should be able to see this come up on screen. So what you're seeing on
the screen is MPEG 2 data that we real-time encoded using this chip onto the hard drive
without playing it back, and this happens real-time.
MR. GATES: We're even adding capability in the Windows CE.
MR. BIDDLE: In the audio.
MR. GATES: Yes.
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.
And this also has interesting sort of repercussion with picture-in-picture, where HDTV has, you
know, very immediate benefits there, as does single-click recoding in an electronic programming
guide on like a Web TV or a broadcast PC. You could go away for the weekend and stack up all
your shows and digitally record them.
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.
Peter Biddle will be giving the DVD conference at
Comdex
Message 6233140
Open Q) Bill G mentions windows CE and Peter modifies. PCs are plenty
but perhaps extension to windows CE is possible? |
