1.2.2.

B. Digital video with hardware assistance: high quality at a price

More useful in the context of CBL, digital movie is now available in two forms: hardware-dependent and software-only. Full screen motion video (FMV) is at present only available with hardware-assisted acceleration, such as that provided by Intel's ActionMedia II and Ace Coin's PCTV-SLC boards for the PC, which support both high end (Production Level Video - PLV - see section 6.2.4) and low end (Real Time Video - RTV) Digital Video Interactive (DVI) files. A very expensive DVI board is also available for the Mac.

PLV is the best quality digital video out there in the market place, but files can only be produced by licensed bureaux. RTV files can be produced in-house with alow cost capture card, but movie quality isn't as high.

DVI is a proprietary format and so doesn't conform to the MPEG (Motion Picture Expert Group) standard. C-Cube compression chips do conform to the MPEG 1 standard and produce better results than DVI, but here too compression (when commercially available) will require bureaux facilities (unless you have the [sterling]80K required for the developer's kit, which includes a Sun SparcStation, or the [sterling]20K for MPEGLab Pro from Optibase, a real-time MPEG encoder for the PC). Good quality delivery will also require hardware assistance in the form of a playback controller card.

The first low-cost MPEG 1 playback controller card to hit the market place is ReelMagic from Sigma Designs, marketed in the UK by SDL/Silica Systems for about [sterling]399. It delivers excellent quality but may have compatibility problems with some graphics cards. Costly MPEG compression will still be necessary, and MPEG 1 (like Video 1 but unlike Indeo and fractal movie) is not truly scalable, though a scalable MPEG playback system is reported to be available from Xing (see section C5 ).