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To: DiViT who wrote (46389)	10/20/1999 6:02:00 PM
From: BillyG	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 50808

Get digital TV on your PC cnn.com October 20, 1999 Web posted at: 11:53 a.m. EDT (1553 GMT) by Cameron Crouch (IDG) -- Buying an expensive high-definition TV is not a practical way to check out the handful of digital broadcasts available today. For a few hundred dollars you can tune into digital TV right on your PC. Hauppauge Digital announced on Monday a digital TV receiver board, WinTV-D. Available at BestBuy for $299, the WinTV-D tuner board enables PCs to receive the full range of television broadcasts, including digital and analog television, as well as high-speed data transmissions. "The WinTV-D is similar to our existing tuner cards," says Ken Plotkin, chief executive officer of Hauppauge Digital. "The main difference is that we've added a digital TV receiver in addition to the analog receiver." Resembling the back of a TV set, the tuner has two coaxial connectors for antennas -- one for cable TV and the other for a digital TV antenna. The WinTV-D will receive any cable channel except pay-per-view. The tuner offers Dolby Prologic surround sound from five speakers on the back. Although the WinTV-D board has no real memory requirements, you do need a system with a 90-MHz or faster Intel Pentium, a sound card, a VGA monitor and VGA card, a cable television connection, and a digital TV antenna. The Advanced Television Systems Committee digital TV formats are broadcast over airwaves, Plotkin says. "You can either use a rooftop satellite antenna or a bow-tie antenna." Background TV while you compute While you watch TV, the CPU isn't involved in the process, Plotkin says. You can resize the image so you can check your e-mail while watching TV, or expand it to full size for TV-like viewing. When the WinTV board receives a digital image, it manipulates the format and sends it at a rate of 30 times per second over a PCI bus into VGA memory for display on your monitor. Most VGA monitors are inherently high definition, Plotkin adds. WinTV-D also requires a Microsoft Direct Draw driver. It works with any graphics card that supports Direct Draw, Plotkin says. Hauppauge is not alone in the TV tuner card space. Besides other standalone tuner cards, graphics cards like the ATI All-in-Wonder and Matrox's Marvel G200-TV include a TV tuner. You replace your existing VGA card in order to use them. Currently, about 78 digital television stations operate in the United States either as network or PBS affiliates. With the FCC-mandated transition from analog to digital transmission (in major cities), Hauppauge expects digital television and other types of broadcast to rise. The other benefit of high-definition broadcasts is that the digital transmission can be used to send data to consumers, "bringing TV and data together in the same transmission," Plotkin adds. For now, WinTV-D may enable your PC to give you a taste of high-definition TV. And if you like it, you may want to consider a high-definition television or, at least, a bigger monitor.

To: DiViT who wrote (46389)	10/20/1999 6:18:00 PM
From: BillyG	Respond to of 50808

Pioneer 27.4 Gbyte DVD (CUBE partner).......... eetimes.com Pioneer taps violet laser for 27.4-Gbyte DVD system By Yoshiko Hara EE Times (10/20/99, 2:38 p.m. EDT) TOKYO — Pioneer Electronics Corp. has demonstrated a 27.4-Gbyte optical disk system that can store four hours of high-definition video. The system uses a 405-nm violet laser developed by Nichia Chemical Industries Ltd. With all work on formats for first-generation DVD products scheduled for completion by year's end, Pioneer is shifting its development focus to next-generation DVD products and hopes to leverage Nichia's newly available violet laser. The prototype disk system, which can store four hours of high-definition video in 1,080i at variable bit rate at an average 13.4 Mbits/second, was shown at the Japan Electronics Show 1999 earlier this month. Pioneer intends to propose the system as the specs for the next-generation DVD-video system. The desktop prototype player with the violet laser reads out signals from each layer of a two-layer disk — the same structure as today's double-layered DVD-video disk with an 8.54-Gbyte capacity. The prototype disk has a track pitch of 0.37 micron, about half of the current disk, and a capacity of 27.4 Gbytes for two layers. Triple beam Since the track pitch is narrower even for the blue laser beam spot, Pioneer researchers used three-beam crosstalk cancellation. That technology divides the beam into three, with the outer two beams canceling interference from adjacent tracks while the central beam conveys the signal from the targeted track. "The laser's performance was improved and has approached close to a level of red lasers," said Shogo Miyanabe, manager of disk system labs at Pioneer's Research & Development Group. Nichia started sampling its violet laser early this year and began Oct. 1 to market a 405-nm laser with 5 mW of output power as the first violet semiconductor laser. Pioneer demonstrated a 15-Gbyte disk system in 1997 using a 430-nm second-harmonic-generation laser. At that time, the numeric aperture ratio was 0.5, but since the violet laser has a shorter wavelength, Miyanabe said, aperture could be kept at 0.6, the same as current DVD players. In the demonstration, Pioneer played back 1,080i high-definition moving pictures from the disk. For authoring, each frame is divided into four portions, encoded, then put together. But decoding is done by one decoder supplied by LG Semiconductor. Pioneer has high-resolution disk mastering technology, which originated in a semiconductor process technology called "contrast enhanced lithography."

To: DiViT who wrote (46389)	10/20/1999 9:06:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50808

Creative starts shipping a software DVD decoder with some of its drives..................... dvdinsider.com A Creative DVD Bundle - 10/15/99 Creative Labs is now bundling WinDVD with a number of its industry leading audio, video and DVD drive products beginning immediately. Initially, WinDVD will be included with the Creative Sound Blaster Live Player 1024 audio card and the PC-DVD Blaster 6X DVD-ROM drive kit in Europe. "Creative Labs offers InterVideo the market-breakthrough opportunity we've been waiting for," declared Joe Monastiero, V.P. of sales and marketing for InterVideo. "Their decision to include WinDVD with a variety of their graphics, audio and DVD products will certainly send a signal to the PC industry." WinDVD's impressive list of features includes an advanced intuitive user interface, software video window scaling, software and hardware sub-picture alpha blending, software video signal de-interlacing, and software color and brightness control. WinDVD includes state-of-the-art support for VCD disc and MP3 audio file playback, DVD region control and the most powerful and responsive DVD navigator in the industry. The software has claimed a number of industry firsts, including support for the Microsoft Windows NT4 OS and multi-channel Dolby Digital certification. CONTACT: InterVideo intervideoinc.com