Brother Industries Ltd’s Xing Technology Corp has gone to Array Microsystems Inc of Los Gatos, California for video compression chips to drive its Streamworks real-time video encoder (CI No 2,740). The two-chip video compression chip set, called the Image Compression Co-processor, ICC, and Motion Estimation Co-processor, MEC, is described by Array as the first video compression chip set capable of encoding and decoding MPEG, JPEG, and H.261 video standards at 30 frames per second at variable bit rates and variable frame resolution. Xing’s StreamWorks video stream generator, based on the chip set, costs $6,500. As previously reported, the Xing system will enable authors to add real-time video streams to their Web sites, unfortunately the compression levels are not yet good enough to support MPEG over a modem link, though Xing said it has managed to get 30 frames per second video streams running over 12K-bytes per second Basic Rate ISDN.
