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

To: DiViT who wrote (37340)	11/19/1998 4:08:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

MPEG-2 editing................................. tvbeurope.com According to Al Kovalick, H-P's principal architect for video servers, plans are to have a server-based system sometime in 1999 that will be eventually capable of logo insertions, cuts, fades, SMPTE wipes, and any linear effect. By being based in a server, the system will be able to have the time to do the manipulations. According to Kovalick, how you approach manipulating MPEG-2 video should be based on whether you are in realtime or non-realtime. "In the realtime world, it's too early to say which is the right method [baseband or MPEG-2]," says Kovalick, "but in the non-realtime world, baseband is wrong. If you have pre-knowledge you can do things differently." But Kovalick warns, there will always be the question of price versus performance. Not everyone agrees with Kovalick that in non-realtime baseband is wrong. C-Cube Microsystems has a lot to gain by folks wanting to decode then re-encode -- since it makes the chips that do the encoding and decoding. Its new DVxpress-MX chip may be the world's first all-digital, mixed format compression chip for MPEG-2 (4:2:2 and 4:2:0) and DV25 (as well as another model that adds DV50) (4:2:2, 4:2:0 and 4:1:1). But in order to do the conversion, the single chip converts the compressed video to digital baseband -- with a transcoding latency of seven to eight frames. Dr. Feng-Ming Wang, C-Cube's general manager for the PC/Codec division believes that "the MPEG domain is always limited" and that baseband provides the "least possible problems." Dr. Wang says that the biggest problem is maintaining a compliant MPEG bitstream after the signal is modified without being decoded. "Baseband," he says, "is easy." Baseband may be easy, but it is not the most efficient way of dealing with the need to manipulate video encoded as MPEG-2. Other solutions, like those under development from Lucent Technologies and Sony, involve not just locating the I frame for splicing, but in forcing the creation of an I frame through transcoding so that a splice can take place at any time.