IBM Corp yesterday announced an MPEG-2 video compression chip set and three MPEG-2 decoder chips, but gave precious little real information on them. The parts are aimed at manufacturers of digital video and audio equipment for professional broadcasters and movie makers, multimedia personal computers and workstations, and digital television set-top boxes. The three-chip encoder set is claimed to offer the fewest number of chips to deliver broadcast-quality MPEG-2 encoding at breakthrough prices – and the chips can be used on their own or three in parallel. The other three chips are two single-chip MPEG-2 audio-video decoders, and one video-only decoder. The MPEGSE10, MPEGSE20 and MPEGSE30 encoder chips are sampling now at $2,500 for the set, with general availability in June. The set is $1,500 in hundreds. The MPEGCD10 video decoder chip is generally available now and the MPEGCD20 and MPEGCD21 audio and video decoder production level chips are sampling now and will be ship in volume in October; MPEGCD20 decoders go for $30 to $35 in set-top box quantities above 100,000.
