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To: John Rieman who wrote (44290)	8/30/1999 8:47:00 PM
From: DiViT	Respond to of 50808

Sigma Designs To Release Realmagic Digital Video Recorder (Oh yeah, as per usual Cube's news didn't appear on DJNS) 08/30/1999 Dow Jones News Service (Copyright (c) 1999, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.) SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)--Sigma Designs Inc. (SIGM) plans to unveil its Realmagic digital video recorder, or DVR DVD -RAM at an industry show sponsored by Hitachi Ltd. (HIT), Panasonic and Toshiba (J.TOS). In a press release Monday, Sigma said at the show, it will demonstrate how images captured by a digital camcorder are fed into Realmagic DVR to create MPEG digital video and are then stored on a computer with a DVD -RAM drive, where they can be edited and played back. Realmagic DVR includes software from Vitec Multimedia for digital video editing and Sonic Solutions's (SNIC) DVDit LE for DVD authoring. The company plans to sell Realmagic DVR through original eqiuipment manufacturers and system integrators and release it in the fiscal third quarter. End-user upgrade kit producers will release retail kits incorporating Realmagic DVR. The kits will enable customers to upgrade their Windows 98/NT PCs to video and DVD production systems. The suggested retail price for the code card is $999. Sigma Designs develops digital video products. -Adekemi Sijuwade; 201-938-5388 (END) DOW JONES NEWS 08-30-99 08:02 AM

To: John Rieman who wrote (44290)	8/30/1999 9:07:00 PM
From: DiViT	Respond to of 50808

Philips to launch DVD recorders in mid-2000 By Junko Yoshida EE Times (08/30/99, 5:02 p.m. EDT) eet.com BERLIN, Germany - Rushing to add video-recording capabilities to DVD players, Philips has become the first consumer electronics company to promise the launch of DVD video recorders in 2000, probably after midyear. The Dutch giant demonstrated a DVD video recorder based on the company-developed DVD+ReWritable (DVD+RW) Video format, at the Internationale Funkausstellung (IFA) 1999, Europe's largest consumer electronics show held here this week. In the demonstration, Philips showed that recordings made with a DVD video recorder on DVD+RW discs will play back on any existing DVD video players -- those offered by competitors as well as by Philips. This drive by Philips to commercially launch its DVD+RW video-format-based DVD video recorder within a year comes as the industry faces the irreconcilable fragmentation of rewritable video-disk formats. Different camps are pushing several different rewritable formats including DVD-RW, DVD-RAM as well as Multimedia Video File (MMVF) developed by NEC. Other consumer-electronics companies including Matsushita Electric and even Sony -- a co-developer of the DVD+RW format along with Yamaha, Ricoh, Hewlett-Packard and others -- remain silent on plans to offer digital video-disk recorders. They pointed out that recording capacity and picture quality -- enabled by the DVD+RW video format -- may not satisfy consumers' needs today. Other industry executives also expressed concerns over copy-protection issues. On a 4.7-Gbyte single-sided disc, the Philips-developed DVD+RW video format can record two to four hours of video. Meanwhile, Philips made it clear that it hopes to take advantage of the currently booming prerecorded DVD-video market, by offering consumers, sooner rather than later, a new DVD system featuring the best of both worlds: prerecorded high-quality DVD playback and home-recording capability. Besides compatibility with existing DVD players, Chris Buma, program manager of A/V Disc Recording at Philips Consumer Electronics (Eindhoven, the Netherlands), stressed that DVD+RW, designed to be used for both data and video content, can be played back both on DVD video players and on PCs with a DVD-ROM drive and MPEG-2 video-decoding capability. "The recorded content is portable between PC and CE environments," he said. DVD+RW is based on a phase-change optical technology using a 650-nm red laser. DVD+RW video is encoded in MPEG-2 with real-time variable bit-rate. It provides high bit-rates where necessary while no storage capacity is wasted in scenes with less dynamic video. For video applications, Philips' engineers designed the capability of "lossless linking." This feature is critical for maintaining compatibility between existing DVD disk technologies, Buma said. More specifically, because writing takes place at a constant bit rate, the process needs to be suspended and continued frequently, to support variable bit-rate encoding for the DVD+RW video format. So-called lossless linking prevents "hiccups" by filling buffers, Buma said. "It makes the format very efficient and suitable for random-write in data as well as video applications." The DVD video recorder demonstrated by Philips at IFA was also able to do on-the-fly transcoding from a DV format to an MPEG-2-based DVD video format. The feature showed its potential capability to offer easy-to-use editing facilities, using a single DVD video recorder rather than requiring two video devices. Moving pictures captured by a DV camcorder, for example, when connected through an analog jack, are first digitized and encoded onto a DVD+RW video disk in MPEG-2 format. Or, when linked through IEEE1394, the DV format can be transcoded onto the MPEG-2 DVD format at real-time inside the DVD video recorder. MPEG-2 codec and a separate transcoding chip -- both designed by Philips Semiconductors -- are now used inside the demonstrated DVD video recorder, said Eric F.C.J.M. Tijssen, senior product manager of DVD at Philips Consumer Electronics. Noting the existence of off-the-shelf codecs that can handle both encoding and transcoding, Tijssen said, "We could always use other solutions before finalizing on a commercial DVD video recorder." The current DVD video recorder uses a so-called "constrained variable-bit-rate recording" with the maximum bit rate data at 10 Mbits/second, Buma said. Several consumer-electronics manufacturers, however, remain worried about Hollywood's potential concern over DVD video recorders. First-generation recorders won't feature watermarking capabilities, since the industry can't agree on the subject today, said Buma. "We can't build in a watermarking detection feature, either." Philips plans to launch the DVD video recorder next year both in the United States and Europe. Asked about the price, Buma said that hardware costs will be similar to the first generation of high-end DVD players introduced a few years ago. DVD+RW blank media cost will be similar to CD-rewritable media.