New group wants to pool technologies

CORRECTION
The News item on page 13 of our January issue concerning a new software video alliance incorrectly listed ICOM Simulations as a participant. ICOM, as we reported in a Brief in the December issue, is marketing software-decompressed CD-ROM motion video titles for six hardware platforms. According to its president, Dennis Defensor, however, it is not a member of the software video alliance, and it is not pooling its proprietary technology in any way with any of the companies mentioned.

A new alliance of multimedia technology companies, formalized near Atlanta, GA, in mid-December, has aimed its sights at making it possible for PCs to display NTSC-quality motion video from standard CD-ROM discs and drives, decompressed without a hardware decoder board.

Founding members of this software video alliance include TMM (Thousand Oaks, CA), Iterated Systems (Norcross, GA), ICOM Simulations (Wheeling, IL), and UVC (Irvine, CA). According to Taylor Kramer, TMM’s vice president of technology, their strategy is to pool their separately developed technologies and release to multimedia producers a full range of hardware and software tools for making full motion, full screen “soft” video a reality on desktop computer platforms.

Spreading it around. The allies will favor open architecture, resolution-independent methods which will speed up the spread of TV-quality “soft” motion video from PCs to Macintoshes and other platforms.

They believe that they can introduce multimedia titles with software-decoded video very rapidly, and can quickly establish the appeal of software video as an alternative to MPEG, DVI and other hardware-based decompression systems. By not presenting users with the hurdle of a costly (and not universally compatible) hardware investment, soft video could become dominant in desktop multimedia. Because the decompression software can be included on each disc, soft video formats would insure compatibility and could continue to improve technically.

Wasting no time. TMM projects availability of an Intel 80486-based producer’s workstation in the first quarter of 1992 that will contain both the UVC 7710 compression chip and Iterated Systems’ fractal compression board.

This system will offer developers the real-time, run-length compression approach of UVC and TMM, especially useful for capturing and editing digital video, together with Iterated Systems’ asymmetric and resolution-independent fractal soft video technology, which, the participants claim, will achieve high compression ratios and resolution independence in the distribution discs. (See Focus story, p. 9.) Such a workstation, TMM says, will also include a universal formatter, able to cross-convert various compressed and non-compressed digital still-image and motion-video formats to and from one another.

Over the wires. Also in the Atlanta allies’ plans for the next two years, according to TMM’s Kramer, are digital compressed video transmission over cable and telephone/ISDN networks and ultimately software-decoded “better than HDTV” playback/reception.

In the nearer-term, UVC-owned On Call is setting up a satellite-based compressed digital video store-and-forward communications system to serve the cooperating software video companies, multimedia developers and distributors.

Bernard Banet