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

To: Stoctrash who wrote (33930)	6/19/1998 9:55:00 AM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

Sony vs. the "Rest"........................................ tvbeurope.com The driving force behind MPEG was the need to squeeze as many channels aspossible into the bandwidth available for over the air broadcasting. SoMPEG compressed the signal temporally as well as spatially. It introducedthe idea of sending information for a full frame once every Group OfPictures (GOP), and filling the rest of the Group with change data. Theresult was a dramatic reduction in bandwidth, accompanied by inflexibility.The MPEG 'toolbox' was meant to be all-embracing and deliberately didn't gointo the fine detail of specific applications -- it left large areas to bedeveloped by individual manufacturers for different applications. Thecomputer industry embraced MPEG with enthusiasm; computers don't likeoutput-driven timing. They much prefer file transfers which take place whenthe computers are ready to handle them. Which is why Sony's allies todayare found almost exclusively in the computer industry -- Hewlett Packardand IBM, to name a couple. So there were two basic systems in use: one recorded the information foreach full frame, the other recorded the information for a full frame andthen some change data before the next full frame. The 'digital earlyentrants' looked at MPEG's temporal compression and decided they wereunsuitable for station operations, where signals are processed on a frameby frame basis. And the rest Led by Panasonic, they came up with a frame-based 'standard' nowknown proprietarily as DVCPRO. Sony, by now way behind in this race andless than enthusiastic about adopting its arch-rival's standard, saw itschance: develop an MPEG station operations compression standard.Hence a previously unforeseen MPEG standard known variously as 4:2:2Profile Main Level MPEG-2, or Studio Profile MPEG-2, or more simply 'SX.'Using only I and P frames (no B - bi-directional predictive frames) andrunning at 18.5Mbps, SX has been accepted into the MPEG-2 family and has atheoretical quality advantage over DVCPRO in that it oversamples the colourdifference signals (4:2:2 as opposed to 4:1:1). But implementing this new standard in functional hardware proved ademanding task, and Panasonic with DVCPRO (a Motion JPEG standardconsisting of I frames and running at 25Mbps) was in the marketplace arounda year ahead of Sony. Given that the vast majority of station engineers had(and still have) serious reservations about processing temporallycompressed signals at station operations level, the battle seemed all butover just a few months ago, with around 85% of US stations committing to anew digital standard: DVCPRO.