Content area
Full Text
Fremont, Calif. - Five-year-old PC-motherboard maker Alaris Inc. is making a dramatic shift in its business focus in a bid to become a leading audio/video-compression product company.
While continuing its traditional computer system business, the company aspires to provide "one-stop-shopping for audio/video communications technologies," ranging from video e-mail and Internet broadcasting to videoconferencing, said Alaris director of business development Clement Lam.
Crown jewel of the re-invented Alaris is an efficient, non-standard compression algorithm that uses variations of a DCT-based algorithm developed by its team of Russian engineers, based here.
The company recently released a video e-mail package, called Videogram. By using its compression algorithm, 30 seconds of motion video can be compressed to a 0.5-Mbyte file. In other words, 60 seconds of video can easily fit into a 3.5-inch floppy disk (1.44 Mbytes).
This highly compressed file, however, is only half of the Videogram story, according to Lam. "More importantly, we are selling our technology's usability feature." Because a Videogram-compressed file is attached with a 150-kbyte decoder algorithm, which self-extracts and self-executes when a video e-mail is opened, there is no need for those who received a Videogram file to download a Videogram player from the Web, or to go out and buy a PC with Videogram-decoding hardware or software.
Because the Videogram player is always attached at the beginning of a compressed file, users, when opening a big video file, can cancel its downloading at any time and still view the video file to the point where downloading stopped.
Smart processing
Furthermore, the technology comes with the smarts to create an intermediate file to increase playability of the Videogram file on slower PCs. By detecting the display performance of a playback machine, Videogram pre-processes the image...