Food for thought...
zenith.com
If the ZE SetTop boxes are Divicom then who's in these?
Zenith will be among the first consumer electronics companies to begin selling a new kind of video product that will provide more than two hours of video programming on a disc the size of an audio compact disc.
The digital video disc - or "DVD" - is an extremely versatile technology. Because information is encoded onto discs in digital form, video information can be "sampled," or read, several times to correct signal errors and ensure perfect picture accuracy.
Digital code also makes it possible for software producers to include as many as eight different language tracks on a single disc. In addition, DVD uses MPEG2 compression technology and runs at a very high transfer rate, which means that it can read the digital code on the disc very quickly. An audio CD is read at 0.15 megabits per second. The DVD can read 4.7 megabits per second -- about 30 times faster.
There's more.
The information on the disc is non-linear, which means that it is not necessarily read in the order in which it is written. The DVD has information stored all over the disc, just like the CD-ROM on a computer. That information can be read at any time, whenever necessary. This makes several new functions possible. A movie can have any one of several outcomes, played randomly or by your selection. A movie that is too graphic can skip certain scenes or substitute them with less graphic ones for parental control.
In addition, a disc might include background on the movie, such as documentaries about how the movie was made, scenes that were cut out of the final release, even out-takes showing scenes that didn't work out. It even brings a level of interactivity to video that is currently only available on CD- ROM.
Best of all, it provides digital picture and sound clarity, far superior to a VCR. |
