marquet@bohra.cpg.oz (John Marquet) (11/30/90)
Rick McCormack writes: > As an aside, a study in 1988 by Business Communications Co., indicated that by > 1993, the market would be split as follows: > videodisc players: 17.1% (such accuracy) > > CD-ROM: 40.1% > > CD-Video (CD-I and DVI): 33.5% > This is for industry growth figures in business use. Any ideas if these > figures have changed in two years? > I wouldn't want to bet. There's several strikes against the CD-I and DVI scenario: DVI is no good for large collections of stills. The compression algorithm relies on there being considerable commonality between successive images, which is true of movies, but not of stills. Analogue video is a consumer durable on tape, and is becoming so in disc. When we started out in the video disc publishing area, it took maybe three weeks to get a disc pressed. Now it's overnight. DVI loses resolution. VGA loses colour range. Regular video doesn't. It's easier to overlay computer generated stuff on video monitors than it is to overlay video stuff on computer screens. We sell video discs worldwide. That in itself is a challenge, because of the variety of players around, but it can be done. It's only in the U.S. that feature junkies demand the products on CDs, and mostly their enquiries are not well-informed. For many video applications, it makes no sense to go the trouble of digitising the frames, particularly in instances where the pictures are from the `real world', rather than computer-generated or man-made. D
jimf@idayton.field.intel.com (Jim Fister) (12/03/90)
>DVI is no good for large collections of stills. The compression algorithm >relies on there being considerable commonality between successive images, >which is true of movies, but not of stills. The compression algorithm for stills is different. In fact, you can store stills at a variety of sizes by using no compression, various levels of compression, 9-bit or 16-bit storage format... On one still we worked with (768x480, 256 colors), file size varied between 188k (uncompressed) and 28k! Of course, the smaller file did not look as crisp. No doubleplusungoodcompanytalk here, as Orwell might say. Greetings from the Rocking Metropolis. JimF