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To: John Rieman who wrote (24431)	10/26/1997 9:57:00 PM
From: Rutgers	Respond to of 50808

Hi, John, is it just me or are the authors of the DVD-ROM article not only lazy, but guilty of spreading stale information? Thanks for the link. I just don't understand the comment regarding Creative. As you know, Creative's PCDVD Encore, their second generation drive, has been available at least from the beginning of October. Furthermore, I just flipped through our Sunday insert from COMP USA to find that the Creative PCDVD is the ONLY DVD-Drive advertised. So, what kind of reporting is that?

To: John Rieman who wrote (24431)	10/26/1997 10:33:00 PM
From: BillyG	Respond to of 50808

Interesting excerpt from the PC Magazine review................ Sure doesn't sound like SoftDVD. All-in-one decoders coming, too Perhaps the biggest reason to wait, however, is for the next versions of the decoder cards. There are new decoder chips on the way (such as the DVDPC LS220 from LuxSonor) that integrate all functions on a single chip: MPEG-2 decoding, Dolby Digital decoding, video and audio interface, and even DVD copy-protection support. Some chips (like Chromatic Research's Mpact/3600 media processor chip) are programmable, so features can be added on the fly. Chips like these will make it easier to integrate the graphics and DVD functions onto a single expansion board that can replace an existing graphics adapter, so you won't need two cards. All the designs in this roundup rely on an analog-overlay design, which means that the graphics card has to leave a hole in what it displays to leave a space where the DVD image appears. This requires careful synchronizing of the signals between the DVD decoder card and the existing graphics card. Also, either the graphics signal has to be looped through to the decoder card or the DVD image must be sent across the PCI data bus to the graphics card. Both strategies have performance and quality drawbacks. Putting all the functions on a single card means that the graphics processor and the decoder can write to the same shared video-buffer memory. This will improve playback image quality and performance. There are even chips that can handle all the decoder and graphics-processing functions, eliminating the need to have different subsystems handled by different chips on the board. The first boards of this type are expected to reach the market by the time this is in print; you can expect to see them in new computer systems first, because they will save a slot for DVD-enabled configurations. As an upgrade, this approach requires the user to replace the graphics adapter, so there may be a longer delay before this type of hardware finds its way into the upgrade market.