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TORONTO -- The hint that DVD could ignite the dormant multimedia PC market is triggering an avalanche of hardware and software work. Two major announcements this week--from PC graphics mainstay ATI Technologies Inc. and video-CD vendor C-Cube Microsystems Corp.--
mark the leading edge of a landslide of offerings.
But the landslide will have to sweep away three major obstacles to reach its goal. First, no one knows the price/
performance points at which a PC/DVD combination will succeed. The possibilities range from essentially cost-free software-only decoders that can't reach rates of 30 frames/second to full hardware decoders that may cost nearly as much as a complete DVD player. Second, no one is sure whether a typical user wants to play back DVDs through a PC.
And third, any PC-based DVD solution will have to wait on the resolution of licensing issues with Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., which holds the rights to the DVD decryption scheme.
Showing one way to cope with this uncertainty, ATI (Toronto) today will announce a spectrum of four decoder solutions. They
include a complete software-only DVD solution; a software MPEG 2 video/AC-3 audio decoding solution combined with ATI's new 2-D/3-D video chip with motioncompensation capability; software AC-3 decoding combined with IBM Microelectronics' new MPEG-2 video decoder chip; and a complete hardware solution employing IBM's MPEG-2 decoder and Zoran Corp.'s AC-3 chip.
ATI has teamed up with CompCore Multimedia Inc.--now a part of Zoran--to offer its first software-based MPEG-2 video and AC-3 audio decoding products. But Mediamatics Inc. will soon support ATI's DVD system solutions as well.
C-Cube (Milpitas, Calif.), in contrast, will announce a pair of "single-chip" DVD decoders-- one with 5.1-channel AC-3 audio output, the other with 2-channel audio output. Samsung Electronics and Aiwa Co. are reported to have already adopted the parts for standalone DVD players, and now C-Cube is turning its attention to the PC market.
The parts require 20 to 24 Mbits of external DRAM, some VRAM, a bus interface, mixedsignal components and glue logic in order to work in a PC, but
that still represents an advance in integration, the company said.
The ATI and C-Cube announcements may or may not start a major move toward the integration of DVD players into PCs, but they...