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To: shane forbes who wrote (9803)	2/15/1998 6:19:00 AM
From: shane forbes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25814

More useful stuff about DVD stolen from C-CUBE: c-cube.com Hollywood and DVD: The vast majority of marketable movie titles are controlled by a handful of movie studios, collectively known as Hollywood. Naturally, getting Hollywood's support for a new movie distribution format is a necessity, and Hollywood has been deeply involved in the creation of the DVD standard. The introduction of DVD has many implications for Hollywood: DVD has the potential to change the balance between the rental and sell-through revenue streams, there are copy protection and distribution control issues, and DVD offers some interesting new mechanisms for charging consumers for the movies they watch. Video Rentals and Sell-Through Hollywood earns billions of dollars more from home video than it does from theatrical ticket sales, so the Home Video divisions of the studios wield considerable influence in Hollywood. A few years ago, the standard wisdom was that consumers would rather rent than buy movies, and the studios set the prices of films high as a result. Disney, however, has proved that consumers will buy well-liked films if priced appropriately, and other studios have followed suit. Today, movies priced for sell-though (consumers) retail for about $20; movies priced for rental sell for between $80 and $90. Hollywood would like to expand its sell-through business, but the market for sell-through is extremely price elastic: a film that simply gathers dust on the shelf at $25 may fly off the shelves at $18. Since the cost of duplicating and distributing a VHS tape is fairly high ($3.50), a movie must be a guaranteed block-buster before a studio will price it for sell-through, because if a studio was forced to lower the price of a movie to encourage sales, their margins would drop to unacceptable levels. By lowering the cost of duplication and distribution to about $1, DVD can substantially affect the sell-through model by giving the studios more price flexibility, without lowering margins to unacceptable levels. Pay-per-View While DVD promises to lower costs, its digital nature offers options for generating revenue that analog distribution formats cannot. The problem with VHS tape and laser disc is that it is impossible to control who watches them or how often, whereas the data on a DVD can be encrypted or scrambled, allowing the distributor to control viewing. For example, in a pay-per-view model, a consumer buys a DVD at a nominal cost, perhaps less than $10. His DVD player is equipped with a modem and connected to a telephone line. When the consumer plays the movie, the DVD player calls the distributor of the movie, and the consumer's account is charged $2 There are several possible variations on this theme. Since a DVD can hold up to four feature-length movies, it is possible to have the entire Indiana Jones or Star Wars trilogy on a single disc. The consumer could buy the first movie of the series outright, and then buy the other two via credit card from home. It would also be possible to store other kinds of digital data on the disc with the movie; for example, a movie-inspired computer game. Like the sequels discussed above, this game would be encrypted. To play it, the consumer would call the distributor with a credit card number and receive a decryption code in return. Copy Protection Because the video quality of DVD is very high, movie content owners are concerned that counterfeiters will be able to either use DVD movies as masters for VHS tape or simply copy the data on to another disc using a computer. By encrypting or "scrambling" a movie when it is mastered and putting a decryption circuit in consumer DVD players, digital copying can be prevented. In addition, DVD players can be designed with a copy protection feature that prevents a movie from being copied on to video tape without a severe degradation in quality. This feature does not interfere with playback to a TV monitor.

To: shane forbes who wrote (9803)	2/15/1998 6:20:00 AM
From: shane forbes	Respond to of 25814

previous post continued: DVD on the PC: Today nearly all personal computers are sold with a CD-ROM drive. When CD-ROM was first proposed in 1986, 680 Mbytes was many times the capacity of a typical hard disk drive, and there were no programs that would completely fill a CD. This is no longer true. Many personal computers come with disk drives that hold over a gigabyte of data and many games with multimedia content are too big to fit on a single CD. As a consequence, personal computer makers are looking forward to putting DVD-ROM drives into PCs, and when they do so, adding a DVD video decoder is all that is necessary to bring DVD's excellent video and audio to the PC for entertainment, games, education, training and promotional applications. For the reasons outlined above under "Copy Protection," movie content owners are concerned about DVD movie playback on the PC. If the decryption of the movie data is done by the computer's central processor, then decrypted data could be stored on one of those large hard disk drives that many PCs possess. Once there, the data could be easily copied on to another media. Three schemes have been proposed to prevent copying: Eliminate the "Save As" function from "Movie Player" applications. This scheme is simple to implement, but not too difficult to circumvent. Some Hollywood studios want stronger safeguards. Modify the computer's basic operating system such that it will recognize DVD data and prevent copying by any application running on the computer. All of the studios approve of this scheme, but modifying operating systems is not trivial. Windows 97 will purportedly implement this feature sometime in 1998. Arrange the computer hardware such that the DVD data never flows over the main bus (PCI Bus), which prevents it from being decrypted by the CPU and recorded on a hard disk or tape. Figure 7 is a block diagram of such a PC, which shows the relationship of the subsystems. In addition to making copying difficult, this system is potentially the most efficient, keeping both compressed and uncompressed audio and video data from overloading the PC's main bus.

To: shane forbes who wrote (9803)	2/15/1998 6:27:00 AM
From: shane forbes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25814

and last continuation of previous post (and best part of all !): DVD and Convergence: As can been seen from the discussion of DVD players, the DVD decoder chip is the heart of a DVD player. And DVD is based on the MPEG-2 standard for digital video distribution, as are most direct to home satellite systems and wireless cable systems. In fact, the DVD decoder chip is a super set of the video and audio decoder chips required to build a home satellite receiver or a wireless cable settop box. The Convergence Box Because DVD players have much in common with satellite receivers and cable settop boxes, it is likely that one or more of these devices may converge in a single unit, a so called convergence box. In fact, the PC is a kind of convergence box as well. DVD and the Internet One PC application is browsing the Internet; however, a DVD player also contains almost all of the circuitry required to support an Internet browser, making full-fledged PC unnecessary. While at first the synergy between the browser and DVD player may not be obvious, the combination offers a wealth of opportunities. For example, it would be possible to showcase all of the clothes in all of the departments in a department store, complete with video of much of the merchandise on a DVD. The connection to the Internet would allow the customer to get current prices, order merchandise, communicate (via email) with a personal shopper or pay their bill. Such a service via the Internet alone is not practical: the low bandwidth available to users would make the "catalog" intolerably slow and limit the audio and image quality that the catalog could deliver. A DVD-based catalog would deliver great interactive performance with a rich audio and video experience, but at $1 to duplicate and deliver, a DVD catalog would be far cheaper than today's print media. This combination of DVD and Internet can be extended to other applications as well, including education, training and on-line games. DVD and Game Platforms DVD versions of today's gaming platforms will also likely appear. Today's Sega Saturn, Sony and 3D0 platforms use CD technology as the delivery platform for their games. However, the single-speed CD drives used in these machines limit interactive performance, which in the twitch game world is everything. DVD provides access and data transfer rates that are ten times faster than single-speed CD-ROM, and the video experience DVD brings can significantly expand the scope and quality of the games, not to mention the utility of the game machine itself. We at C-Cube do not know which, if any, of these merged devices will become popular. Certainly devices with decidedly different applications are likely to remain separate. Take the PC for example. While a PC can be made into a perfectly good DVD viewing system with the addition of a DVD-ROM drive and a DVD decoder chip, the PC is likely to remain in the study or den because of its other applications -- word processing, tax return preparation, electronic mail and the like -- and the need for a desk-bound keyboard. On the other hand, stand-alone DVD players and satellite receivers will be attached to the TV in the family room, making these two devices good candidates for convergence, especially in Europe where the Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) standard is guaranteeing compatibility between satellite receivers from various manufacturers. --- LSI's BBC work relates to DVB in Europe? Also I made this point earlier but the more integrated these gadgets become the more I think this plays into LSI Logic's hand. Other companies may have a STB or a NC chip or a DVD chip or a gaming chip or a camera chip or a communications chip but not too many have design experience in all. Like I said I bought LSI for the consumer area and the more I see the more I like! Just seems to be taking a bit longer than I initially anticipated!

To: shane forbes who wrote (9803)	2/16/1998 4:50:00 PM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25814

Shane, stuff you posted from the LSI Logic web site: For several years, the pace of silicon-process technology has exceeded the capabilities of EDA tools, which has led to a so-called "design-productivity gap." System designers, for example, couldn't create eight-million gate ASICs because there were no EDA tools available to handle these huge designs. this solution gives engineers tools that allow them to design multi-million gate chips. LSI should have asked some mainframe people. For over 20 years, complete mainframe designs, including several-way multiprocessors have been simulated, each and every gate, functionally and at speed, before a single one was committed to Silicon. Not only that, but the hardware was simulated with MVS and diagnostics running against it. Tony