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To: BillyG who wrote (49381)	5/18/2000 4:38:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

Matsushita's new DVD-RAM recorder. It will have a card with it with an MPEG-2 encoder and it will edit........... eet.com DVD-RAM recorder sports new copy-protection scheme By Yoshiko Hara EE Times (05/18/00, 3:35 p.m. EST) TOKYO ? Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. has taken the wraps off a 4.7-Gbyte DVD-RAM recorder equipped with the new Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM) copy-protection scheme. This is CPRM's first implementation in a DVD recorder. The product is expected to hit the Japanese consumer market at the end of June and the U.S. market later this summer. Matsushita also announced 4.7-Gbyte DVD-RAM disks. "We've waited for the [CPRM] copy-protection scheme to be finalized so that we can guarantee secured copyright protection and seamless connection between the audio/video [AV] and PC worlds for our DVD-RAM recorder and drives," said Kenjiro Kuno, director of the DVD Media Division of Matsushita AVC Co. "The DVD-RAM format will accelerate the fusion of the audio/video world with the PC world," said Kuno. "It is nonsense to use different disks for AV and PC applications. The DVD-RAM format will satisfy all the needs of consumers." Matsushita ? along with IBM, Intel and Toshiba, its partners in the so-called "4C" group of companies ? developed the CPRM format in an attempt to quell the fears of nervous content providers, such as Hollywood studios, about security in recordable DVD players. Version 0.9 was publicized on the Web in late April. "The licensing scheme of CPRM is now being hammered out. By marketing time [June], it will be ready," said Etsuji Shuda, group manager of DVD-RAM business department at Matsushita AVC. Under CPRM, digital content providers such as broadcasters can specify whether their content can be copied freely or one time only, or whether it cannot be copied at all. The CPRM system picks up the signal and responds appropriately, scrambling the content, for example, if it receives a signal for one-time-only copying. When the competing DVD-RW recorder was introduced to the Japanese market last December, the CPRM scheme was not yet available. Early products from Pioneer, including DVD-RW models OEM'ed by Sharp, use a different security scheme, which allows them to record freely available content but not content available for one-time copying only. The DVD-RW manufacturers' group has been awaiting the availability of CPRM, and vendors are are expected to catch up with DVD-RAM in CPRM implementation. Infringement concerns That's important, because CPRM has emerged as a key technology for recorders built for export to the United States and other markets where content providers are wary of infringement. Thus, Matsushita will begin exporting DVD-RAM recorders shortly after launching them domestically, whereas DVD-RW recorders are expected to remain limited to Japanese sales for the time being. Although Matsushita is emphasizing the fusion of audio/video and PC technology, an MPEG-2 encoder board for PCs won't be available in time for the recorder's launch. The board will make it possible to play, edit and record content in a common form that the consumer recorder can read. The hybrid variable-bit-rate MPEG-2 encoder will control the compression rate depending on the complexity of images. "MPEG-2 encoding processing requires a hardware encoder at present," said Shuda. "We are developing it to market as an option by autumn." In the meantime, Matsushita will bundle MPEG-1 encoder software into its DVD-RAM disk drives ? even though the MPEG-1 images recorded on a DVD-RAM disk cannot be played by the DVD-RAM recorder. The Matsushita recorder, dubbed DMR-E10, will carry a price tag of about $2,300. It has three recording modes, XP, SP and LP, which record at around 10, 5 and 2.5 Mbits/second respectively. A high-end model also has playback features such as progressive scan and a Dolby digital 5.1 channel-surround decoder. Simultaneously, Matsushita will roll out a DVD-RAM disk, the DY-HB47, in a cartridge for video recording. It will sell for about $25. One DVD-RAM disk can store an hour of XP-mode video, two hours of SP mode or four hours of LP-mode video footage. Audio is encoded into Dolby digital two-channel stereo by an in-house developed chip. Matsushita expects that the worldwide DVD-RAM market will grow to about 150,000 units in the first year the recorders are available, with the Japanese market accounting for about two-thirds of that total. In the second year the market will grow to about 500,000 units, Kuno said. Matsushita is now developing DVD-Video players and DVD-ROM drives that can read DVD-RAM disks, but did not disclose when those products will appear on the market.