CD-ROM Expo is an orgy of industry alliances

Finally, all those years of talking to themselves at industry conferences may be paying off.

The most exciting overall trend at this year’s Multimedia and CD-ROM Expo in San Francisco was an unmistakable rush by vendors to improve cross-platform compatibility and broaden their support for standards across the board. All the major players, and a few minor ones as well, were jumping on the alliance bandwagon.

WHAT A LINEUP!

Microsoft will add DVI support to Windows by adding a Digital Video command set to its Media Control Interface (MCI). Asymetrix will build a developer’s kit for DVI.

IBM will add DVI support for DOS machines, with its LinkWay Live and Photomation software. (IBM has already been supporting DVI on its OS/2 Ultimedia systems.)

Microsoft’s Multimedia Viewer software will enable the development of CD-ROMs that can be read on the new Sony portable CD-ROM/XA computer as well as on the MPC platform.

Apple’s QuickTime will support Kodak’s Photo cd images, enabling them to be brought directly into Macintosh applications.

Optimage, Philips’s CD-I tool company, will introduce tools to permit developers to cross-convert CD-I and MPC titles.

MediaVision’s Motive will permit development of cd’s with compressed full motion video that can be shared across platforms, including Sun, Silicon Graphics, Macintosh and PC systems.

Apple has — and may ship, it’s being cagey about it — a QuickTime player for Microsoft Windows.

IBM, Texas Instruments and Intermetrics will jointly develop Mwave, a new digital signal processor (DSP) chip for DOS, Windows and os/2 systems, which will replace several hardware boards. Designed to be able to process speech, music, motion video and still images simultaneously, Mwave will provide the kind of concurrent processing power that may be needed for future multimedia applications.

VIDEO: CHEAP AND FREE

Intel announced that it was making its specifications for DVI Real Time Video (RTV) available for zero-royalty licensing. At the same time, the company said that it was submitting RTV to the Interactive Multimedia Association for consideration as a compressed video standard.

The IMA will only consider “open” or non-proprietary technology, and is evaluating candidates for cross-platform digital audio standards. It is likely to endorse a range of options that can mesh with quality requirements and computer horsepower.

Chips and software. One way to widen the appeal of multimedia is to lower the cost barriers to turning already-installed computers into multimedia-capable ones. Software motion video decompression is a way to accomplish this. IBM, for example, announced its Photomation developer’s kit for software-decompressed motion video applications. Photomation will support resolutions as high as IBM’s XGA video display standard.

To improve the quality of color images on garden-variety VGA-resolution monitors, Tandy announced a video chip that will support a color depth of 16 million colors on its MPC monitors, a vast improvement over the usual 256 colors. Though the company didn’t announce a price for the chip, Tandy’s Howard Elias said it would be “real cheap.”

Also toward the goal of facilitating system upgrades, MediaVision announced Audioport, a digital audio module that plugs into a parallel port instead of taking up a slot.

Representative of other trends, both JVC and Philips showed increasingly affordable one-off recordable CD-R (CDs) publishing systems.

In a hardware development that would represent an important breakthrough, Pioneer announced that its new six-disc CD-ROM changer would support data transfer rates four times faster than previous drives, at 600 MB per second. This could end some of the frustrating time delays experienced when using CD-ROMs, and may affect the evolution of digital video on cd.

ALL IN ALL, A DISAPPOINTMENT

But it must be said that despite a lot of activity on the show floor, there were no “hot” or “must-see” products. What would have been the whizziest demonstrations at the CD-ROM Expo were rumored to be faked — leading us to the conclusion that we still have a very long way to go before we reach multimedia heaven (or even limbo, at this rate).

What still works best on a CD-ROM are text databases, and despite its more pedestrian nature, this category is still the most successful — and the most utilitarian — for the technology.

Of course, there was plenty of evidence and even more rumors about industry alliances to come, for everything from co-development of consumer products to disc compatibility across platforms. One must wonder when disc-based “multimedia” products — today still slow and of limited or unfathomable utility — will live up to the hype and expectations. Maybe next year … ?

Bernard Banet, Denise Caruso