C-Cube's DVxplorer......................................
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COMMENTARY
C-Cube's DVxplore Chip Promises Home-Desktop DVD-Video Production
By summer 1999, consumers will be able to afford the technology to produce their own DVD-Videos on their home computers thanks to C-Cube Microsystems' DVxplore chip.
The chip, the PC industry's first MPEG-2 and DV25 consumer video codec, is a bridge from the camcorder to the PC to DVD players, allowing users to record content to DVD-RAM or CD-R/W and then play it back on any consumer DVD player, according to C-Cube representative Mary McCarthy.
DVxplore enables average PC users to capture video from analog or digital camcorders and compress it to fit on DVD-RAM or CD-R discs, or on PC hard drives, email, and Web pages. C-Cube is targeting four markets: retail products, OEM bundles in the build-to-order PC market, set-top boxes with storage, and bundles with DVD-RAM drives.
The chip will be used in both PC cards and home DVD-Video players. Peripheral cards with the DVxplore chip will be able to record MPEG-1 and DV25 digital video streams, used in digital camcorders, and analog streams from a television or videocassette recorder. The chip can convert these formats to and from MPEG-2 for storage on a DVD-RAM disc.
Manufacturers expect writable DVD to become popular when the hardware becomes more prevalent, and read-only DVD drives add the necessary optics to read DVD-RAM, DVD+RW, and DVD-RW discs (all existing DVD drives are DVD-R-read-capable). Panasonic, which marketed one of the first DVD-RAM drives with discs that can be read by DVD-ROM, predicts it will ship more than 9 million DVD-RAM drives in 2000, as opposed to 200,000 in 1998.
C-Cube charges approximately $75 for DVxplore when shipped in volume to OEMs. The chip will be available in third-party add-in boards for approximately $299 and could be selling as low as $199 by Christmas. Previous MPEG-2 editing systems from C-Cube have cost thousands of dollars.
C-Cube Marketing Director Christopher Day says the company took its more expensive chips and cut out the more complicated features necessary for video professionals, thus lowering the price and making the chip user-friendly for average consumers.
Editing capabilities include dual-stream MPEG-2 editing, single-stream DV editing, and real-time special effects such as fades, wipes, and dissolves. DVxplore's variable bit-rate recording lets users record hours of DVD-quality video to DVD-RAM, CD-R, or CD-RW, or PC hard drives (one hour of video takes up 1GB of space). DVxplore also allows ultra-low bit-rate MPEG-1 encoding for video email applications and Web pages.
DVxplore also will be the basis for new PC/TV applications that will include the ability to record, replay, zoom-in on, and fast-forward through live broadcasts.
Day won't name the manufacturers working on DVxplore-based applications, but he says C-Cube has close working relationships with WebTV and Microsoft. He also says Creative Labs markets high-end DVDs and $499 DVD-RAMs that DVxplore would go "hand-in-hand with."
The software that includes the MPEG-2 and DV codec chip is complex, he says, and companies began several months of development work after receiving the chip last fall. The chip will probably be available in PCs by the Christmas season.
McCarthy believes products based on DVxplore will appeal to both professionals and consumers. Many video professionals have editing systems at home, she says, and the applications will be low-cost and easy enough for the whole family to use. "There's lots of folks who want to do editing at home, and there's an emerging market for TV on the PC," McCarthy says.
She says the lesser quality of videos edited using the DVxplore chip compared to more expensive applications will be very noticeable to professionals, but the DVD-quality pictures will be a vast improvement over current consumer-priced content creation products.
"They wanted this to be simple and fun," she says of DVxplore's creators. "That's the bottom line."
(C-Cube Microsystems, 1778 McCarthy Boulevard, Milpitas, CA 95035; 408/944-6300; Fax 408/944-6314; c-cube.com)
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