From a company called CQ...........................
microsoft.com
DAVE MARSH: This is the thing that's doing the work on the MPEG encoding. This is a reference design from CQ that uses their DV Explorer MPEG encoder chip, and that's what we're using is the CD front-end module.
DAVID COLE: Great.
DAVE MARSH: Now, using our circular buffer architecture, we're able to record everything just on the off chance that it might be useful. So this this comes in handy if, for example, I've missed a bit of the TV show, because I was talking to you, or whatever. Then I can just rewind and then play and see that whole show again, or see just a bit of it or whatever.
DAVID COLE: So right now just playing back this part is it's spooling up, for lack of a better word, the current live broadcast?
DAVE MARSH: Absolutely, yeah, I mean, an important thing here is that after I've watched this action replay, because we're always in time shifting mode, then we can just carry on straightaway afterwards without missing anything. Or if I decide half way through that this is a great TV show, because it's been buffered to the hard disk, I can ask for it just to be stored up in my personal archive collection.
DAVID COLE: Great.
DAVE MARSH: Now you might have used live pause or watched some action replays or whatever. You'll now be behind real time. But during the boring bits you can fast forward to catch up with the live. We haven't quite mastered time shifting yet -- or rather we haven't quite mastered time travel yet, I should say. So in the initial release it will automatically go into play when it gets back to live.
And, in fact, just to prove that this is live, if I switch to the camera input, that should be there, and if I just kind of wave my arms around a bit or something, and then there we go, we can just have an action replay of that, and just include a little bit of the CD that we have on the start, and then it will go into a replay of that.
Now, these features are extremely useful, and people are going to kind of wonder how they ever lived without them, but we can do far more than that. And we're using an intelligent condensation. We can basically change the whole TV viewing paradigm. We really can de-couple TV viewer schedules from TV broadcasting schedules.
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