The technology industry can be prone to some pie-in-the-sky thinking about convergence; the merging of computers and microwave ovens, for example.
But the merging of PCs and VCRs took a concrete step forward Monday when C-Cube Microsystems unveiled its new DVD chip. The company's DVxplore multimedia chip promises low-cost recording and editing of DVD video on a desktop PC, using video pulled from a TV, VCR, DV camcorder or analog camcorder.
"For the first time, recording and editing ... video will be available in absolutely a mainstream product," said Chris Day, director of marketing for the PC/codec division at C-Cube.
Digital Video Disc is an optical storage medium with many times the capacity of CD-ROMs. So far, the format has found a home in the entertainment market, including movie rentals.
Day said that C-Cube's all-in-one chip will find its way onto PC video cards priced at approximately US$300 by next summer. The system will be able to record six hours of DVD quality video. Consumers will be able to edit and play back DVD-quality video on standard PCs and then archive to DVD, Web pages, email, and PC hard disk drives.
Video card manufacturers can license the new technology from C-Cube and support all three prevailing video formats -- MPEG 1, MPEG 2 and Digital Video (a standard supported by many Japanese camcorder manufacturers) -- in a single device. The chip also represents a salvo against a competing digital video editing format -- full-motion JPEG -- which is particularly popular among high-end professional video editors.
Currently, computers are connected to TVs using a cable run through the s-video port on the back of the PC. Such arrangements also require a graphics or video card. But future video cards using DVxplorer will use the same port connection to TVs, and will store many hours of video. The technology will allow editing of video while it is being simultaneously broadcast, something that conventional VCRs cannot do.
"[Before the new DVD chip] you weren't really able to do things like edit in MPEG 2 on the PC," Day said. "Three or four years ago, consumers were looking at a $3,000 or $4,000 card, so it was really a market for professionals. In the meantime, prices have gotten lower but not anything like this."
TV capture cards also will be capable of making use of DVxplore, which feeds TV broadcasts directly into a PC. Day expects manufacturers of these cards to use the native intelligence of C-Cube's technology to provide new kinds of "smart" functions.
"If I recorded Fraser three weeks in a row and then forgot to record the show the following week, my PC will know to [recognize the pattern] and record it on its own," Day said. "This is a radically new concept that you can't do with tape-based recorders."
Observers say C-Cubes latest DVD technology should find a receptive audience, especially among consumers.
"There are three camps interested in this," said Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie & Associates, a consulting firm in Tiburon, California, that tracks the digital multimedia market. "The consumer, people who use video cards for nonlinear editing; the 'prosumer,' people who for the most part work as videographers; and the professional, which are high-end studio people."
Peddie said that competing standards, such as full-motion JPEG, will continue to be the technology of choice among professionals who edit video using banks of VCRs and other equipment typically costing tens of thousands of dollars.
