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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DiViT who wrote (28975)	1/30/1998 4:56:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50808

DVD Camcorders and more............................................ ijumpstart.com DVD NEWS <Picture><Picture><Picture> DVD camcorders Senior DVD execs from Matsushita (Panasonic) were in town last week to give the company line on DVD-RAM. Although the company didn't reveal any new products it showed, for the first time, photographs of its concept model of a DVD-based camcorder. This may not be too far away. Mutsuo Takenaga, executive technical manager at Matushita, said that real-time MPEG-2 encoders based on the company's DSP technology would be available "very soon" - he produced a chart showing its appearance by the end of 1998, although an AV codec was not slated to appear before 2000. DVD camcorders need not wait for the arrival of 4.7Gb DVD-RAM: 1 hour of MPEG-2 video can be stored on current 2.6Gb discs. Meanwhile the TV production journal Broadcast reports that the BBC is working with Japanese and US broadcasters to develop a DVD camcorder. It says that NHK has shown a prototype camera at Japanese TV technology fair InterBEE last November. DVD for all It is surprising how quickly the tools are arriving for low-cost DVD authoring. The arrival of affordable DVD recordable drives should spark a revolution. Already Sigma Designs reports that, in the US, applications for computer-based training, distance learning and interactive kiosks are being ported to the DVD format. Another important market is education, where learning materials can be put on a server and broadcast to schools. Sonic Solutions has added to the list of affordable tools with DVDit! - an easy-to-use tool for corporate audio/visual professionals and desktop video enthusiasts. The application is made up of a QuickTime/OMF to MPEG-2 software video compressor, a DVD navigation and multiplexing engine and a UDF formatter. These work seamlessly together to convert Microsoft PowerPoint presentations and QuickTime movies into DVD-Video files and disc images. QuickTime doesn't support MPEG-2 just yet, it only supports MPEG-1 video playback. All you need is a Power Mac with 64 Mb of RAM. The joke is that you probably won't be able to deliver it on a Mac for quite some time, although that probably isn't so important. It's a Pentium world out there. The price is $895. There's an excellent free primer on mastering DVD titles which is downloadable as an Acrobat file. See dvdit.com. Conference DVD on the PC: Making it Work for Consumers 24-25 February, Newark, California This will be the second DVD conference hosted by the Software Publishers Association. It continues SPA's effort to promote industry-wide compatibility for DVD-ROM product development and engineering. For further information, contact: Glenn Ochsenreiter at +1 202 452-1600, ext. 327 (glenno@spa.org), or Geoff Tully at +1 310 476-8347 (geoff@tully.com). The SPA DVD-ROM Initiative Web site is at: spa.org.