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

To: Peter V who wrote (32360)	4/18/1998 1:13:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

Well, we know some of the things. Like a daughter card plugged into an ATI(not a current ZiVA customer) graphics card. NLE on DVx(lots of DVx) Divicoms new encoder that puts upto 40 channels in the space on one. A proto type of something only Bill Gates gets to play with, and he didn't even need to pay the $299. Maybe a proto type of a Transceiver, developed with Adaptec. Maybe some other things.

To: Peter V who wrote (32360)	4/25/1998 8:04:00 AM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Here's what C-Cube was showing at CES............................ cybertheater.com C-CUBE, NOT ICE! We stopped by the C-Cube booth and found out more about their ZiVA chip, a third generation MPEG-2/ Video CD 2.0 decoder for use in DVD players. The chip includes a 16:9 to 4:3 filter. When used with the hardware and software included in their ZiVA-Kit, switching for Y/C or component output can be added. It can include a hardware or software-autoswitch for PAL/NTSC output using frame rate conversion. This is the chip that is used in several new DVD players, including those from Marantz and Samsung. Lucky Goldstar is building a DIVX player with the ZiVA chip. The ZiVA is also found on the decoder card of the 2nd generation Creative Labs Encore DVD-ROM player, as well as those in the Toshiba Tecra and Packard Bell computers. The C-Cube representatives predicted that GOOD DVD players will shortly be available at the $400 price level. We had great fun at the C-Cube booth because we were talking "geek-to-geek" to the engineers and designers with no PR-type interfaces. We found out that the Video CD decoding part of the Ziva chip is very important for the Asian market. China has only two or three government run TV stations and no VCRs. In the past three years there has been an explosion in Video CD, with over 20,000 titles currently (Karaoke is a big hit). They foresee this leading to a demand for DVD as well. We asked about the costs of DVD encoding and authoring, since C-Cube is involved in supplying chips to OEMs for these systems as well. They said that systems from Minerva or Sonic Solutions currently cost about $70,000. But they said similar systems were moving from SGI computers to Mac and NT based systems and prices were dropping to the $30-40,000 range. They predicted that good desktop encoding/authoring systems, using their 4th generation encoder, the DVx, would shortly be available for ~$10,000. We asked what they meant by the DVx encoder being "4th generation." They said that their 1st and 2nd generation encoders were built in 1994/95 and were used by Direct TV (and other OEMs) for real-time encoding of single channels. These encoders employed adaptive field/frame encoding, choosing between video or telecine (3/2 pulldown) on the fly. They used 14 chips, whereas the 3rd generation reduced the chip count to 7. Then they told us that their 4th generation encoder uses ONE chip! This single chip includes two 50 Mbps encoders/decoders (adequate for HDTV). It can do simultaneous read/write operations. Currently, sample prices for the chip are $1500 and a complete system with software using one would cost ~$10,000. In 12 months, the system price would drop to maybe $1000 and be suitable for DVD-RAM. By the year 2000, the chip price should drop to $75 and the system price $500. They showed us a "reference design" PCI bus card using this new DVx chip. It was one of the most sparsely populated PCI cards we have ever seen: it contained one large IC plus assorted surface mount devices and traces. The card can handle two video streams for frame accurate editing. They demonstrated using a Betacam SP source, MPEG-2 encoding it at a FIXED rate of 5 Mbps directly to a hard drive. Then they played back the compressed video from the hard drive through the card as a decoder. There were no obvious MPEG artifacts! This card with software for simple editing is expected to have a street price of about $500 within 12-18 months. We are absolutely amazed that a fixed bit rate encoder can have such quality and at such a potentially low price. This means that home recording using MPEG-2 compression, e.g. to a recordable DVD at consumer prices is not so very far in the future.