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

To: Stoctrash who wrote (34568)	7/22/1998 11:49:00 AM
From: BillyG	Respond to of 50808

MSFT Chromeffects May Speed Net Multimedia Nice work from the Redmond guys. (07/22/98; 10:13 a.m. ET) By John Gartner, TechWeb Microsoft announced its next-generation Internet multimedia architecture Tuesday at the Siggraph computer-graphics conference in Orlando, Fla. Originally code-named Chrome, Chromeffects technology for delivering low-bandwidth interactive content will be released to developers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) within the next 30 days. Chromeffects uses Extensible Markup Language (XML) tags to describe ads or 3-D graphics, to instruct the client PC how to animate objects locally, rather than sending a fully rendered object over the Internet, Microsoft said. The add-on technology to Windows 98 is scheduled to ship to system OEMs, integrators, and hardware resellers by the end of the month. Shortly thereafter, PC manufacturers will begin to offer new PCs with Chromeffects preinstalled. Microsoft (company profile) had originally planned to release the technology next year. Because of the intensive computing power required on the local PC, Microsoft doesn't consider Chromeffects a mass consumer technology, said Eric Engstrom, general manager of multimedia at Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash. "Consumers who have recently purchased computers and new PCs with the latest graphics capabilities are the focus today," Engstrom said. Microsoft is trying to limit the distribution of Chromeffects to PCs with enough processing power, and, unlike previous OS enhancements that were freely distributed, will not post the client software over the Internet. Explaining Microsoft's decision to restrict distribution, Engstrom said Microsoft is trying to guarantee a good user experience. "If we provide it free on the Web, there's no way we can help there," he said. A minimum Win 98 PC configuration of a 300-MHz processor, 64 megabytes of RAM, and DirectX 6.0-compatible 3-D graphics accelerator is suggested to take advantage of the technology. Hardware vendors will sell Chromeffects software to existing customers with sufficient hardware to run the technology. Microsoft officials would not comment on pricing for the stand-alone version of Chromeffects. Microsoft said it anticipates Chromeffects-enabled PCs will be widely available for the busy fourth quarter shopping season. Engstrom said though holiday PCs aimed at gamers will be an important part of the Chromeffects audience, business PCs are also in the mix. "This is the first time we've taken our multimedia APIs [application programming interfaces], which were originally aimed at games, and directed them to our business applications," he said. "We want to allow people to communicate in multimedia, not just text." Chromeffects relies on Microsoft's DirectX 6.0 APIs, which communicate with drivers that accelerate multimedia services by taking advantage of hardware capabilities. Since DirectX 6.0 is not available for Win NT 4.0, Chromeffects playback and development will initially only run on Win 98 systems. Chromeffects will ship as part of the next NT 5.0 beta and be incorporated in the final release, expected later this year. Engstrom said though Chromeffects is separately priced today, it may become part of Win 98. When a second generation of Chromeffects is available and sufficient hardware that runs Chrome is installed, Microsoft may integrate the technology. More............ techweb.com