IBM, HP set home PC MPEG debut

Electronic News, Sept 4, 1995 by Reinhardt Krause

NEW YORK - giving the MPEG-based video and audio compression market a boost, both IBM PC Co. and Hewlett-Packard will soon introduce their first MPEG-based offerings for the home PC market.

IBM - initially targeting software-based playback on Pentium-based systems - next week will roll out its first home PCs with MPEG support. IBM's strategy will be to use its Mwave digital signal processor to perform MPEG audio functions - freeing up the Pentium microprocessor to decode MPEG-based video, according to industry sources. IBM's new Aptiva systems will range from 75MHz to 133MHz Pentiums.

HP's home products division this fall will unveil 120 and 133MHz Pentium-based systems with the company's first MPEG systems, sources said. While the machines' horsepower suggests a software-based decoder, HP's strategy is said still to be in flux. HP has not yet announced any deals with the likes of Mediamatics or Compcore Multimedia.

Compaq, HP, Acer, Packard Bell and IBM are now among the top-tier PC makers locked in fierce competition for the home PC market, with multimedia capabilities a key battleground. Vendors of MPEG chips and board-level products contend that the base-line playback capabilities offered through software-based strategies will create demand for hardware in the long-run.

In one of the first efforts to bring hardware-based MPEG playback to the mother-board, S3 and Compaq have unveiled a new PC architecture based on an S3 chipset to be used in Compaq's Presario PCs by year-end (EN, June 19). Packard Bell, meanwhile, recently rolled out new Pentium-based machines that are MPEG-1-ready based on Compcore Multimedia, Inc.'s SoftPEG technology (EN, July 17).

Still to be heard from have been the likes of HP, IBM and Acer. An IBM source said: "Depending on the application, it's not quite so fast as what Compaq promises with S3, but the reason we went this route was time to market and cost. This is a cheaper implementation which means the customer gets a better deal."

IBM is still looking at hardware solutions for its desktop offerings, he added. IBM's Thinkpad 760CD notebook computer, meanwhile, will soon be equipped with a MPEG-2 chip manufactured in-house by IBM, other company sources said.

Meanwhile, MPEG capability is migrating to other desktop systems. Micron Electronics, for example, has been working with Brooktree Corp., which last year introduced its BtV MediaStream chipset. The BtV chipset (EN, Nov. 14, 1994) supports Mediamatics' MPEG decoding software, called the Arcade Player. Also expected to unveil motherboards using the BtV chipset are Elitegroup Computer Systems and Taiwan's First International Corp.

While some semiconductor makers, notably Cirrus Logic, contend that the MPEG market will not blossom until next year, there are now indications that this year's Fall Comdex will have many new MPEG-based offerings from PC makers. Last year's Fall Comdex was notable because many MPEG-1-based board products surfaced from the likes of Jazz Multimedia, Creative Technology and Smart & Friendly.

Despite the emergence of software codecs that run on CPUs from Mediamatics and Compcore, board vendors such as Diamond Multimedia are not threatened, the vendors claim. Diamond, in fact, has licensed Mediamatics' Arcade Player MPEG-1 software for its Stealth64 line of multimedia accelerators.

"With a software MPEG strategy what we offer people is the opportunity to try MPEG and take a look at it and then make a decision on investing money on a standalone complementary MPEG decompression card for full frame rate and other features," said Ken Comstock, Diamond's director of graphics product marketing. "We have a fairly positive outlook on MPEG. We think it's rapidly being adopted as the standard video decompression standard in the PC world."

More MPEG support from PC makers, such as IBM and HP, is likely to spur more MPEG title development for CD-ROMs as well as the Internet. More content developers are also expected to jump on the MPEG bandwagon as the result of Microsoft's hooks in Windows 95 for software and hardware-based MPEG playback. Microsoft, which has licensed Mediamatics' software decoder, is expected to release a software developer's kit for MPEG later this year.

Microsoft is working with the Open MPEG 1 (OM1) consortium, which has developed a MPEG application programming interface for MS-DOS systems. Most available titles currently though, are based on Sigma Design's API. Sigma Design recently announced drivers for Windows 95.