As part of its effort to put the PC in the living room, Microsoft has been working behind the scenes to develop two new algorithms that will let a PC display better-than-TV video images from a DVD ROM. The company claims the new algorithms, Bob and Weave, will be particularly helpful to PC OEMs who will need to convince consumers to purchase a PC that incorporates a DVD-ROM drive, rather than a stand alone consumer DVD-ROM player. According to a recent detailed report in the Electronic Engineering Times, Bob uses an overlay to display video as a single odd or even interlaced field. Weave merges two interlaced fields into a frame, taking advantage of the 3:2 pull-down information embedded into an MPEG-2 stream, thus allowing the display of material that originates as film in a 24-frames-per-second format. Aimed at the high-end of the home market, the algorithms are for consumers who wish to watch movies on a six-foot wide projection screen.
