Soft DVD: promising but not yet ready

Electronic News, March 16, 1998 by Peter Brown

Its major shortcoming is taking too much of the MPU

San Jose, Calif.--Up until the last few months, soft DVD offerings for the PC, implementing software DVD algorithms in a PC instead of traditional semiconductor decoders, has been the goal of the consumer electronics market. Much of the complaints about soft DVDs lie in the quality issues as well as consuming approximately 90 percent of a CPU's bandwidth to run a single DVD movie.

The goat, however, may turn into a golden goose. Recently, one of the major proponents of soft DVDs, Zoran, has persuaded 10 multimedia companies to utilize the company's software-only DVD decoders in up-coming products. Some of these companies include graphics accelerator heavyweights ATI Technologies, S3, Rendition and Nvidia as well as Fujitsu, Silicon Motion and IX Micro.

The allure of the soft DVD has always been in its low price. With the growth of the sub-$1,000 PC market and the decreasing prices of high performance microprocessors, the addition of soft DVDs becomes more attractive. Still coupling that software with a 266 or 300MHz microprocessor always contradicted the cost savings. Despite bringing more functionality and differentiation to segment zero, soft DVDs won't be widely used until the price of these microprocessors is lowered. So the Zoran agreements may be for future products not yet announced, observers believe.

In addition, Microsoft's PC'98 and PC'99 specifications that call for PC OEMs to include DVD in many of their offerings is also a spur for interest in soft DVDs. These soft DVDs may allow a PC vendor to differentiate its products. Levy Gerzberg, president and CEO of Zoran, claims soft DVD enables all of the features of hardware DVD but at a lower cost. The software supports full resolution MPEG-2 video and Dolby digital and Dolby Pro Logic audio playback as well as DVD navigation, graphical user interface, CSS copy protection and 3-D audio capabilities. "What we see is a combination of software and hardware as the basis of our strategy," said Mr. Gerzberg.

"It's very likely in the near future the low cost, segment zero PCs will feature a combination of hardware and software. Maybe a hybrid or maybe utilizing the two offerings together. Definitely there is not a place for software DVD at that level now, but wait a few years, it will all be software." Zoran envisions having at least one-third of its business come from software DVD once it takes off, he added.

Content Still A Key Issue

According to Dan Vivoli, VP of product marketing at Nvidia, which has signed on as a Zoran soft DVD licensee, pricing curves will enable most PC OEMs to adopt soft DVD over the long run because the CPU will come down in price. Now, however, he agrees there is no place in the market for it.

"This is not at the core of our strategy," he said. "We really will use this in time as a value added proposition," said Mr. Vivoli. "DVD is an interesting topic on PCs but the real killer applications for DVD have not happened yet. I think when the storage aspect comes into play and more games are developed for DVD, then we will see a need to lighten the price of DVD-ROMs."

Others think the DVD community needs to focus on content rather than get bogged down with platform concerns. Content and proper standards concerns is what the industry is demanding, said Francis Tang, senior director of strategic marketing at Acer Labs, Inc (ALI). Mr. Tang acknowledged the value proposition DVD brings to PCs is very attractive and the potential of huge future revenues is enticing, but they will not be achieved without content and standards.

This DVD shortcoming may be on the way to being solved. There are more than 600 DVD titles on the market now and plans are to triple that number by the end of the year. "People are trying to bring DVD to 80 percent of the multimedia applications and this is creating standards confusion as well as content problems," said Mr. Tang. "There can be numerous technological innovations but they won't amount to a hill of beans without multimedia rich content. Mix DVD with 3-D and put it on the (World Wide) Web and then you have other areas of interest that involve sub-$1,000 PC. I believe this is far away."

PC DVD board maker Sigma Designs believes there are three things that need to be done before software dominates the PC space; motion compensation must be integrated into the VGA card, AGP should also be used to speed up the frame memory and PCs should use SDRAMs.

"Everything eventually moves to software and I would imagine in about 2-3 years we will see software dominate the PCs with DVD," said Prem Talreja, VP of marketing at Sigma. "However, hardware will always find a home somewhere else. Other applications will begin to pop up like HDTV. It all boils down to cost, and software will obviously always be cheaper. Now with the requirements needed to run software DVD, it's not cost effective."

The CSS Problem

One problem that has confined software DVD to niche markets is establishing proper encryption coding. Initially, soft DVD technology suffered from not having the approval of the DVD Consortium's copy protection scheme known as content scramble system (CSS).