Zoran Corp, Philips Semiconductors and Media Computer Technologies Inc have worked together to create Videomaster I, a personal computer add-in board reference design featuring full motion capture and playback of the US NTSC or the European PAL television standards quarter-screen video. On-board video scaling enables the image to be smoothly resized to smaller or larger resolutions while maintaining image quality. Microsoft Corp Video for Windows device drivers are available for the reference design to ensure compatibility with various personal computer video applications. The VideoMaster I uses Motion Joint Photographic Experts Group image compression to reduce disk storage requirements and the system data rate to a level that can be transmitted to conventional hard disks over the standard, low speed personal computer AT bus. The video can be edited frame-by-frame. Zoran implemented the board’s video compression capability using its 045 Motion JPEG Multimedia Chip Set. This supports real-time capture and playback of full-motion NTSC and PAL video under Video for Windows. The Philips SAA9051 digital colour decoder chip set handles the front-end input for PAL, NTSC or SECAM video in desktop multimedia systems and converts the incoming analogue signal to a digital output and stores it in a 6Mb frame memory. The digital output to the frame memory is sent over a 12-bit data bus. Media Computer Technologies’ Video Manager Plus enables integration of full motion video with record and playback functions and Super VGA graphics. A software and hardware combination, it applies digital filtering to the video stream to reduce the noise level, sizes the video picture, stores it in memory, converts YUV data to RGB video, and supports full motion video in either NTSC, PAL or CCIR-601 formats, displaying the video data in real-time at VGA or Super VGA resolutions, and has built-in colour keying to mix video and graphics on a pixel by pixel basis. The VideoMaster I reference design is available now from all three of its developers.
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