DVD Doings DVD-equipped PC on the way By Alexander Wolfe, EE, EE Times Atlanta -- Despite recent talk of a delayed takeoff for DVD- equipped PCs, both computer and higher-priced standalone consumer DVD drives were the main buzz at an otherwise lackluster Spring Comdex here last week. Indeed, news emerged that several big DVD-related announcements would be made over the next few weeks, indicating that digital-videodisk technology is finally poised to hit the market in a big way. Reports from the show floor suggest that DVD leaders like Pioneer, Hitachi and Toshiba seem intent on recouping the millions they've spent developing the technology and haggling over standards issues in the DVD Forum trade group by aggressively marketing drives to OEMs who are gearing up for volume purchases. "From what we're seeing, PC OEMs are ready to run with DVD," said Yogesh Khare, marketing manager at Sigma Designs Inc. (Fremont, Calif.), which introduced a DVD decoder card at the conference. Among the Comdex developments: Several unnamed "first-tier" computer OEMs will announce plans later this month to ship DVD-enabled PCs, according to sources at Chromatic Research Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.). The machines will use Chromatic's Mpact media processor as a decoding device, the company said. The first PCs could hit the market as early as July. Hitachi Ltd. will use PC Expo in New York next week as the venue to detail an aggressive strategy for DVD-ROM drives and to take the technology to the next level with what it claims is the first rewritable DVD-RAM drive. The unit lets computer users record 2.6 Gbytes of data. Hoping to build interest in DVD as a consumer playback technology, Polygram Video is releasing a raft of popular movies on DVD this month, including Dead Man Walking, Fargo and Four Weddings and a Funeral. In addition, competitor Time-Warner is also upping its output, releasing films such as Tin Cup and Disclosure. Aiming to jump-start the sales of consumer DVD players, Philips Consumer Electronics later this month will launch a video-store rental program that lets consumers try out a machine at home for $20. After several years' delay, the music industry is finally signing on to the DVD standard. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said last week it expects to have a spec for a DVD music disk nailed down by year's end. Taken collectively, the announcements constitute a marked turnabout for a technology that only weeks ago seemed to be mired in controversy surrounding the Content Scrambling System (CSS) copy-protection technology. (Chromatic has a CSS license and is supporting the feature in its Mpact chip.) More important, consumers looking for something new on the PC horizon seem eager and willing to embrace DVD. Indeed, at last week's Comdex, crowds elbowed their way into the tiny Sigma Designs booth, where the company played DVD movies on four monitors to showcase its decoder card. "They [OEMs] were waiting for software to come out," said Khare. "Previously, there were only about 50 titles available. But now the titles are starting to hit and they're pretty reasonably priced--about $20." By pointing to Hollywood movies as the spark spurring interest in DVD-equipped PCs, Khare highlighted one of the big paradoxes of the DVD world: the demarcation between consumer and PC players has blurred. Originally, DVD proponents were betting that the 4.7-Gbyte data-storage capacity of the disk would make it an immediate hit with games developers. However, games programmers are grappling with problems of their own--notably, the difficult transition to Microsoft's DirectX application-programming interfaces--and have largely stuck with CD-ROMs. One of the few DVD offerings around is Silent Steel, a submarine-war game made by a company called Tsunami. For their part, consumer-electronics marketeers concerned by the higher price of the standalone DVD players are hoping the buzz created by the PC community will get customers in their doors. Standalone players begin at $550 minimum, against $300 to $400 for the computer drives. Clearly, price remains a major concern on the PC front. Sigma said it's seeing lots of interest from OEMs in its bundled solution, which consists of the new decoder card and a Pioneer or a Toshiba DVD-ROM drive for $499. But there's intense pressure to shave costs. "We're already seeing OEMs asking for price cuts," said Khare. "They want to pay less than $100 for the decoder cards and less than $200 for the drives." Such relentless downward pricing momentum could be an advantage for Chromatic and its Mpact media processor, which last week was looking like a big winner. That's because Mpact is positioned as a cost-effective triple threat with the ability to handle 2-D and 3-D graphics functions along with DVD decoding, eliminating the need for a separate graphics-accelerator card. According to Chromatic executives, several major PC OEMs will use the E3 multimedia conference in Atlanta later this month to announce plans to ship DVD-equipped PCs that use Mpact as the decoder solution for DVD playback with CSS copy protection. Chromatic declined to name the OEMs, but hinted that they number some of the industry's top players, potentially including Compaq Computer Corp. (Houston). The Mpact chip will be incorporated via add-in cards, such as those currently available from STB in Richardson, Texas and from Taiwanese vendor E4. Though Chromatic designed the Mpact processor, it doesn't make silicon. Instead the chip is manufactured and sold by its semiconductor partners, LG Semicon, SGS-Thomson and Toshiba. Chromatic profits by selling the software that controls and runs on Mpact. Because the PCs are slated to ship as soon as July, the news is expected to greatly speed the deployment of DVD. The announcements could also give a big boost to Chromatic in its bid to make Mpact the media processor of choice in its competition with Philips's Trimedia processor. An even bigger Mpact endorsement appears to be coming from the motherboard community. At Comdex, Proside, the San Jose, Calif., American sales arm of Tokyo-based parent company Proside Corp., unveiled its PRS-M55TM36X Pentium MMX motherboard, which includes an on-board Mpact chip. And sources said that several other Taiwanese vendors came to last week's Computex show in Taipei planning to show Pentium motherboards equipped with Mpact. However, one sticking point in the rush to Mpact could come from the software side. Reports are surfacing that the Mediaware 2.0 software from Chromatic, which enables Mpact to handle DVD decoding, is still being tweaked. At Comdex, Proside was demonstrating a board running a beta release of the software, though a final version is expected soon. While DVD appears on the verge of a big breakthrough in the PC world, things are less certain in the consumer-electronics arena. Several big marketing efforts are afoot, but industry experts are not as sure of their success as are their PC counterparts. "The true growth will be in PC-equipped DVD," rather than consumer drives, said Malcolm Klein, a former broadcaster and a member of the board of DVD-tools vendor MediaShower Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.). Nevertheless, Philips is working with its sister company Polygram Video to build momentum there. While Polygram rolls out new movies on DVD, Philips will set up kiosks in video stores hawking its co-branded Philips/Magnavox 400AT DVD player. Beginning June 24, customers will be able to rent a player, which lists for $549, along with a DVD movie for one or two nights for $20. One key missing participant that could give a big boost to the DVD consumer push is the recording industry. Buoyed by chart-topping sales in 1994 and 1995 from rap artists and from mainstream acts such as Alanis Morissette, record companies decided to stick with CDs as their primary format. In addition, technical concerns that DVD sound quality was tailored to Hollywood movies caused the recording industry to opt out. However, a major sales slump in 1996 and a bleak outlook for the remainder of this year has apparently prompted the RIAA to take another look. A move to new format can galvanize sales, as when CDs replaced the long-playing vinyl record in 1984. The RIAA said it will conduct listening tests on proposed systems this summer and expects to have a draft specification for a DVD music disk by December. The disks themselves should hit the market in about two years, the RIAA said in a statement. Hitachi, too, is looking ahead to future technologies. The Tokyo company will use PC Expo to showcase its next-generation DVD-RAM rewritable technology, which can record a total of 5.2 Gbytes of data on two sides of a disk. Hitachi said the drives will begin shipping June 20. Hitachi demonstrated the drive at Comdex last week, running on a PC equipped with Windows 95. Like all drive makers, Hitachi uses decoder technology to connect its DVD units to current-generation PCs. That's necessary because Windows 95 does not incorporate native DVD drivers. Memphis, the upcoming successor to Windows 95, is slated to include native DVD support from Microsoft. However, industry sources report several points of technical debate. For one, many insiders think that even with Memphis, OEMs will continue to use hardware-decoder solutions--either on add-in cards or on the motherboard--because they are likely to offer near-term performance advantages over software-based decoding. In addition, peripherals makers and Microsoft still have to coordinate all the details of the multimedia command set that DVD drives use to communicate with Memphis over the Atapi interface. The result, according to the evidence at Comdex, is that the DVD community remains focused on Windows 95 and plans to deal with Memphis when it arrives. Said an engineer at a Japanese DVD vendor, who declined to be named, "Memphis is yet to be decided." (Next article.) (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. 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