Digital Equipment Corp has announced a peripheral chip that, it claims, enables the design of a single PCI board for personal computer-based digital video editing subsystems. The Digital Semiconductor division in Hudson, Massachusetts has come up with the 21230 video codec chip. The 21231 enables personal computer multimedia subsystems to interface directly to televisions and video recorders, converting digital video to NTSC or PAL formats on consumer-friendly MPEG-1 boards. This effectively builds computer-to-TV into the MPEG coder-decoder, meaning only two chips are needed rather than three. It also enables the user to view the video on a monitor for color correction before compiling the MPEG video. FutureTel Inc has promised DEC that it will use the 2123x combination in its Espresso video board, and Omnimedia Technology Inc’s recently announced Zermat multimedia boards are also based on the chips. VITEC Multimedia Inc is expected to follow suit soon.
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