Media Computer Technologies Inc of Santa Clara reckons that its new Video Manager+ – VM+ – chip has got the wherewithal significantly to reduce the cost of multimedia support on personal computers. VM+ is an ASIC which incorporates various facilities needed for manipulating full motion video such as filters, scaling and incremental zoom functions. Additionally the company claims that a lot of the glue logic normally needed has been incorporated into the chip so that a full SuperVGA card with support for video and audio recording and play-back can be built using 11 chips. The company says that it has licensed the technology to several board and systems manufacturers, who will be announcing board-level products in the next few weeks at prices between $300 and $600. One of these is an OEM deal with Hyundai Electronics America. The chip accepts digitised input from NTSC, PAL television or CCIR-601 video sources as well as YUV or RGB digital streams. Media Computer reckons that combining audio, video and graphics onto a single board will avoid incompatibilities common in personal computers stuffed full of multimedia boards, but in addition one of its customers is building the chip-set into a personal computer motherboard and the company says that it expects to see more this as multimedia standards firm up. VM+ supports Video for Windows and Apple Computer Inc QuickTime interfaces as well as Intel’s Indeo video compression hardware. A reference design kit is available to OEM customers including board, design database, driver and application software and the VM+ ASIC is available to add-in board manufacturers and OEM customers for $39 each in quantities of 10,000.
