ADI targets digital segment

Electronic News, Dec 15, 1997 by Gale Morrison

Norwood, Mass.--Analog Devices is expecting that its new ADV601LC video codec will ignite the consumer market for integrated digital video recording, editing, and playback. ADI sees digital VCRs, TV set-top boxes with instant replay, several home video editing and other record and playback applications benefiting from the lower cost and smaller footprint of the hardware option.

ADI Digital Video Products strategy and marketing manager Roger K. Smith said that the market for digital video compression hardware is segmenting into a "playback only" half, where the focus is MPEG schemes, and a "record and playback" half, where the ADV601 family will play. The 'LC is the next generation of the ADI ADV601, with which it is 100 percent bit compatible but one-fourth the size and at least half the price.

"The ADV601LC has enabled us to bring a new class of home video recording and media creation products to the consumer market," Robert Wallin of Applied Magic testified. Applied Magic will bring a new disk-based digital video set-top box to the consumer electronics market later this year, according to ADI.

Unacceptable Situation

"Consumers have access to a wide variety of technology such as DVD, digital camcorders and the Internet, and it is unacceptable that there is no standalone system that enables the consumer to integrate these technologies for increased utility and enjoyment. We will change this with the ADV601LC," Mr. Wallin said.

The ADV601LC draws on wavelet compression and decompression technology to perform as a standalone video codec. The chip attains compression ratios ranging from a "visually loss-less 4:1, suitable for professional studio applications, all the way up to an impressive 350:1, suitable for less demanding surveillance applications," the company said.

Rick Doherty, director of the Envisioneering Group Labs in Seaford, N.Y., conducted a performance evaluation of the ADV601LC. "The compression range of the ADV601LC is amazing, from digital video studio and special effects range down to ISDN-rate security and video conferencing. The ADV601LC is the most efficient digital video coding chip we've seen, gate for gate, pin for pin, pixel for pixel."

According to ADI, because the ADV601LC conforms to the CCIR-601 international standard for representing studio-quality digital video, it can be used in a range of field sizes and field and pixel rates, yielding high-quality results in both NTSC and PAL equipment.

ADV601LC customer Quadrant International (QI) of Malvern, Pa., has finished a new low-cost video capture and editing card based on the ADV601LC. "Wavelet compression continues to deliver the best price and performance to PC video editing applications," David Brott, strategic marketing manager at QI, said. The company's new Tommahawk VCC board is claimed to be the first full D1 resolution video editing board to integrate audio and to be priced below $100.

Displayed at Comdex

"All of this can be accomplished with standard IDE disk drives thanks to the ADV601LC," Mr. Brott said. The new PCI board is available for licensing to OEMs and was displayed at Fall Comdex '97 a few weeks ago in Las Vegas. Other PCI video capture card OEMs who are customers for this codec are Azeena of Long Beach, Calif., Alpha Systems Labs of Irvine, Calif., Momentum Data Systems of Costa Mesa, Calif., and GEC Forward Technology of Surrey, England. Mr. Smith said ADI is providing these customers with a bill of materials less than $60.

With the ADV601LC, "even PCs configured for price-sensitive consumers can be used for video production," ADI believes. Compressed video can be stored with an off-the-shelf hard disk drive. For example, the ADV601LC can compress 25 minutes of VHS-quality video to fit in 1GB of space. Other editable compression techniques, such as MPEG2 I Frame or Motion JPEG, can require up to two times the recording space or transmission bandwidth, it was said.

Mr. Smith said that MPEG Recording options do not come close to the '601LC's price/performance, because those options only provide great performance when they cost over a $1,000 and up to $25,000, in the case of MPEG 2.

A VideoPipe evaluation board is available for $199.95, and those engineers that ADI presented who were working with it now were enthusiastic. "We can safely say this is one of the cleverest digital video evaluation systems ever devised," Envisioneering's Mr. Doherty said about the new ADV601LC evaluation board.

The VideoPipe is a 3-inch by 5-inch stand-alone board permitting simultaneous compression and decompression in real-time. An ADI spokesman said: "This is a big departure from expensive and difficult to install PCI cards."

The "wavelet" technology is high-performance compression schemes for audio, and images that involves the linear transformation of the source signal into frequency components. ADI says wavelet signal processing is an important advance over Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), used in MPEG, in that it allows for "the easy implementation of perfect reconstruction frequency-selective filter banks for sub-band coding of source signals without requiring that the data be processed in limited-length blocks."