PC OEMs scramble to ready DVDs for holidays

Electronic News, June 30, 1997 by Gale Bradley

What appeared in the first half of the week to be a more open field that Chromatic Research, its Mpact processor manufacturing partners and their hardware-only buyers would play on, became a bit more treacherous as IBM customers STB Systems and Sigma Designs, and an unnamed second pair of IBM DVD playback part integrators, came to the fore. These companies will announce their offerings based on the IBM technology in coming weeks, and the systems OEMs they are selling to are expected to follow suit soon thereafter.

To complement the MPEG decoder chips it brought out in March, an IBM division in Endicott, N.Y., and IBM Research encryption algorithm specialists took the DVD content scrambling system (CSS) license the company was granted from Matsushita Electric Industrial (MEI) and came up with software to descramble copy-protected disc content for viewing on a PC.

Other DVD playback systems use a descrambler in silicon, either stand-alone or integrated into the media processor. Kirk Leitch, multimedia marketing manager for Richardson, Texas-based STB Systems, explained that is inherently more expensive, at least for now.

The difference is that IBM enlists the host CPU--which "has more than enough horsepower," said IBM's Don Leake--for the audio processing. Mr. Leake said IBM had to focus on this Pentium-based option for now in order to get to market quickly. The hardware/software system of IBM "uses (Pentium) capacity that's not being used," he said. Mr. Leake is the Digital Video Products sales and marketing manager.

STB also markets the Chromatic Research, et al. DVD playback system to OEMs, Mr. Leitch said. The company expects to market a version of the IBM system to the retail channel soon after it makes its OEM market bid, which will come to the market as "DVD Theatre" in August. Sigma Designs' Prem Talreja, VP of marketing and sales, endorsed the IBM route to DVD for the PC as well.

Mr. Leitch said one factor working in IBM's favor is a roadmap that is planned to bring its MPEG-2 decoding for digital satellite system (DSS) set-top boxes onto a PC board. For PCs, IBM offers two MPEG-2 decoder chips designed for use in multimedia PCs and mobile systems (EN, March 17).