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

To: J Fieb who wrote (36790)	10/18/1998 2:06:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 50808

DVx-MX, the best of both worlds.............................. newmedia.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C-Cube and Divio Deliver New Options for DV i•Serv C-Cube DVxpress technology DivioNW701 codec Two codec chip developers, C-Cube Microsystems and Divio Inc., have announced new silicon for editing DV video that could appear in retail products as early as the end of1998. C-Cube's second-generation DVxpress technology adds DV support to its dual-stream, editable MPEG-2 chipset (See Editable MPEG), processing both dual-stream DV and MPEG-2 on a single chip. Rather than convert DV to MPEG or M-JPEG for editing, as do many current solutions, DVxpress encodes and decodes native DV, thereby maintaining DV's top quality and low data rates where possible. You can create real-time transitions between dual streams of DV, dual streams of MPEG-2 (even at different bit rates), or a combination of DV and MPEG-2. MX25, the first of two new DVxpress chips, supports standard 25Mbps DV and MPEG-2 video. With chip prices expected to fall below $200, dual stream-capable MX25 boards could sell for as little as $1,000. For higher-quality editing, C-Cube's MX50 supports both MPEG-2 and dual-stream 50Mbps 4:2:2 DV formats, including Panasonic's DVCPro-50. Boards using the MX50 chip are expected to sell for between $5,000 and $10,000. DVxpress' multiformat capabilities render the DV-vs.-M-JPEG editing debate moot. M-JPEG vendors have argued that DV's limited 3.6MBps data rate and 4:1:1 color subsampling aren't robust enough for multigeneration editing and multilayer compositing. However, for straight hard-cut editing, constantly converting DV to M-JPEG needlessly compromises quality and/or increases data rate. Mixing 4:1:1 DV with 4:2:2 or 4:2:0 MPEG-2 for real-time transitions offers the best of both worlds. MPEG-2 streams can have either 4:2:0 or 4:2:2 color subsampling as well as bit rates of up to 50Mbps in I-frame, IP, or I,B,P formats. Because 4:2:2, I-frame MPEG-2 is very similar to M-JPEG, DVxpress-based boards could also digitize high-bit-rate, high-quality analog video and mix it with native DV. Best of all for DVD developers and digital television producers, both DVxpress chips offer a real-time transcode from DV25 to MPEG-2. The transcode from DV50, available only on the MX50, takes approximately 1.5 times real time. Transcoding to variable-bit-rate MPEG-2 is also accelerated, though not real time. Divio's NW701 codec, meanwhile, is noteworthy for its potential to dramatically lower the price of single-stream DV compression. Previously, Sony's DVBK1 codec (used in Fast Electronic's DV Master Pro and Canopus' DVRex-M1) was the only solution available for hardware codec boards. And Sony's expensive multiple chip architecture drove board prices close to $3,000. Now, Divio anticipates being able to offer similar products, based on its chip, for less than $1,000. Divio's NW701 will allow hardware vendors to continue to offer added value in the face of 1394 circuitry moving onto the motherboard and software DV codecs becoming standard in Apple's QuickTime and Microsoft's ActiveMovie. Unlike software codec solutions, hardware codec boards offer analog I/O and full-motion, full-screen playback, either to the computer screen or directly out to a video monitor.--Jeff Sauer C-Cube (408) 944-6300 Divio (408) 732-1205 Digital Radar October 1998