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To: BillyG who wrote (48039)	12/28/1999 12:03:00 PM
From: Stoctrash	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

VERY cool Billy..I was just thinking about that type of drive the other day while I was pricing out some CD-rw drives for home and office!!! under 250 us$$'s??

To: BillyG who wrote (48039)	12/28/1999 3:08:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

The year of CD-RW Drives.................................. pcworld.com 2000: Year of CD-RW Drives While rewritable DVD vendors battle, PCs will gain "dual optical" drive combos. by David Essex, special to PC World December 27, 1999, 7:00 a.m. PT 2000 is shaping up to be another mixed year for optical drives as a lingering war over rewritability holds back DVD's potential, lengthening the life of CD-ROM and its rewritable sibling, CD-RW. But consumers will benefit from lower prices and the wider availability of CD-RW and DVD-ROM, according to industry observers. Rewriting DVD History A read-only DVD's standard capacity of 4.7GB is clearly superior to the 650MB of a CD-ROM, making DVD-ROM an increasingly popular option, especially on high-end PCs. But two incompatible versions of rewritable DVD, DVD-RAM and DVD+RW, are in an ongoing competition. Last month, DVD-RAM leapfrogged DVD+RW's 3GB capacity with Hitachi's announcement of a 4.7GB drive it says will ship by January. Other DVD-RAM vendors such as Panasonic and Toshiba are expected to sell 4.7GB DVD-RAMs in early 2000, with 4.7GB DVD+RW likely to come much later. "You will see, finally, the vendors of that club coming out with 4.7GB drives," predicts Jim Porter, president of the market-research firm DISK/TREND. "Frankly, DVD+RW's been mostly a paper tiger. It's been late, and there's been very little hardware." But 4.7GB DVD-RAM will be too pricey for all but high-end home PCs and corporate systems. "The price points are still very high, which won't give it mass-market acceptance," says Mary Craig, principal analyst at Dataquest. CD-RW sales will continue to outstrip rewritable DVDs by at least 3 to 1 through 2002, according to DISK/TREND. Steady Speed for CD-ROM On the read-only side, CD-ROMs will hold sway in the near future. But drive makers won't bother adding more numbers to the notorious "X" speeds of CD-ROMs, which now top out around 50X. And as prices slowly drop, DVD-ROMs will soon be affordable alternatives to CD-ROMs. Most software can't take advantage of the faster disc rotations anyway, Porter says. DVD-ROMs themselves will probably level off at their current "sweet spot" of 6X or 8X. Patrick Griffin, marketing manager for Compaq's Presario line of PCs, agrees that DVD-ROM will quickly take over, with CD-ROMs appearing on only the cheapest systems. Common in 2000, Griffin says, will be "dual optical" configurations--CD-ROM/CD-RW and DVD-ROM/CD-RW combinations. (Why two types of CD drives? To record music from one to the other.) Griffin expects CD-RW to see jumps in rotational speeds in the next year. Hybrid Happiness Combo drives also are in the works; Toshiba demonstrated a combined CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive at Comdex. Craig looks further to a day when optical drives will be the most popular removable medium, displacing magnetic alternatives. "CD-RW and its follow-on combination CD-RW/DVD-ROM product will be the dominant high-capacity, rewritable, removable storage device in PCs by the middle of the next decade, to be succeeded ultimately by rewritable DVD," she says. "Optical's going to win."

To: BillyG who wrote (48039)	12/28/1999 3:18:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

DVxplore loads the sound encoding on the host CPU, to be done in software. iCompression does it on chip. iCompression doesn't transcode, and its consumer version is pixcel impaired.................................. electronicproducts.com iCompression chips bring studio MPEG-2 to consumer electronics Devices encode audio, video, and system signals together on chip The iVAC family of MPEG-2 encoders incorporates audio, video, and system encode functions in a single low-cost chip, bringing MPEG-2 out of the studio and into mass-market applications. The iTVC12 MPEG2 encoder chip provides interoperability of broadcast and high-end consumer systems, as well as transport layer processing. A lower-cost version, the iTVC10, is a subset chip for consumer and USB applications. The iTVC12 encodes MPEG-1 Layer 2 audio and MPEG-2 video at D1 (720 x 480/576) resolution. It also features MPEG-2 transport- and program-stream support for communications, D-VHS, and broadcast applications. The chip appears to be the first to integrate all these functions, which were limited to studio equipment until recently. The video functions also include DVD encoding and temporal filtering. In addition to the MPEG-1 Layer 2, the device can encode 32-kHz, 44.1-/48-kHz, and Dolby AC-3 audio. Its system-layer encoding encompasses the elementary, program and transport streams. The chip requires 12 Mbytes of 108-MHz SDRAM. The iTVC10's MPEG-2 video is limited to 480 x 576 for PAL and 480 x 480 for NTSC. Its DRAM requirements are correspondingly reduced to 6 Mbytes of 125-MHz SDRAM. Audio encoding in the '10 is limited to MPEG and 32 kHz. The system layer encodes only the elementary and program streams. Both iVAC devices are packaged in 456-pin BGAs and require 2.5- and 3.3-V supplies. (iTVC10, $29 ea/10,000/month; iTVC12, $49 ea/4,000/month--available now.) iCompression Santa Clara, CA Robert Ervin 408-727-5077 Fax 408-727-5077 info@icompression.com icompression.com EEM FILE 3130 This article appeared in the Dec 1999 issue of Electronic Products