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To: Stoctrash who wrote (24543)	10/28/1997 3:12:00 PM
From: DiViT	Respond to of 50808

PC industry gets soft on DVD ----------------------------- BTW here's a picture at the event Mediamatics event: biz.yahoo.com ----------------------------- By Robert Lemos October 28, 1997 11:16 AM PST ZDNN zdnet.com Major computer makers think they have a good chance to sell digital versatile disk, or DVD, to 15 million homes by the end of 1998. The key: PCs armed with software-only playback of DVD disks. "We need to do our job so that [the DVD equivalent] of 'Myst' can take off next year -- not in 2001," said Peter Biddle, DVD technical evangelist for Microsoft Corp. Biddle spoke at an event marking the launch of a DVD playback solution by digital video technology firm Mediamatics, a subsidiary of National Semiconductor Corp. On Monday, the Fremont, Calif., company demonstrated its product for playing DVD on a broad spectrum of computers. The product, called DVDExpress, is an application that decompresses the data from a DVD -- also known as a digital video disk -- in only software (on really fast systems), or with hardware assistance. The flexibility to run on machines from a 133MHz Pentium on up is key. "This is a solution for the low-end as well as the top of the line," said Pier Del Frete, vice president of marketing for Mediamatics. The company has teamed up with IBM to create a solution using hardware decompression. Why is hardware necessary at all? For one, decompressing data from a DVD is an extremely processor intensive task -- even a 266MHz Pentium II has trouble keeping up. Slower speed processors require either a hardware decoder or a graphics board that has some video clean-up features. The application will also be one of the first to support DirectShow 2.0, Microsoft's future interface for DVDs and presentations. "[Any DVD solution] has to look backwards and it has to look forwards," said Microsoft's Biddle. "It can't be a dead end." The Redmond, Wash., company is pushing DirectShow as the programming interface for video and hopes to finish up the software in the next few weeks. Other leaders in the PC industry have also taken a strong role in pushing DVD playback into the software realm. Both IBM and Intel have created a style of programming and compiling applications that make the resulting code resistant to backwards engineering. This "tamper-resistant code" is a cornerstone of making the application -- and the digital video it is decoding -- secure from outside copying. Without two giants taking the lead -- and the liability -- in guaranteeing the code, most Hollywood studios would never have allowed their content to be played on the PC platform. With Mediamatics DVDExpress, and its rival Zoran Corp.'s SoftDVD, available for bundling by OEMs, the PC platform has all the pieces necessary to take off in the digital video arena. The big three -- in this case, Microsoft, Intel and IBM -- believe that the low price of the software will spur demand. Others think so, too. "The problem with early DVD drives was that everything had to be done in hardware," said Mary Bourdon, senior industry analyst with market researcher Dataquest Inc. "That made it expensive." With another four companies developing software DVD playback solutions, there will be plenty of choices. Yet, the question remains: Do users want to watch movies on their PCs? For Microsoft's Biddle, there is no doubt. "In 1998, DVD takes off," he said. "In 1999, it takes over."