Alliance and Xing bring MPEG price point below $10.LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 10, 1994--Alliance Semiconductor Thursday announced it would make Xing Technology's MPEG (Moving Pictures Experts Group) An ISO/ITU standard for compressing digital video. Pronounced "em-peg," it is the universal standard for digital terrestrial, cable and satellite TV, DVDs and digital video recorders (DVRs). Player product available for the ProMotion series of MultiMedia User Interface (MMUI MMUI Multi Modal Paradigm User Interface ) accelerator chips. The combination of Xing's software and Alliance hardware brings MPEG playback capability to a system for an additional cost of less than $10 per system, compared to more than $100 per system for previous solutions. Alliance Semiconductor will offer the Xing MPEG Player to OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) The rebranding of equipment and selling it. The term initially referred to the company that made the products (the "original" manufacturer), but eventually became widely used to refer to the organization that buys the products and chip customers for bundling with their ProMotion-based graphics boards and systems. With the Xing MPEG Player product, Alliance ProMotion users will have instant access to a wide variety of MPEG-1 content, including entertainment, educational and reference material. Xing's software decodes MPEG audio and video for MCI-based Windows MPEG titles, CD-I (Compact Disc-Interactive) A compact disc format developed by Philips and Sony that held text, audio and animated graphics. It required a CD-I player that contained its own operating system. movies, KaraokeCDs and VideoCDs. Alliance's ProMotion chips, a family of low-cost PC graphics accelerators, speed up key pixel processing steps to enable full-screen, full-motion display with Xing's software. "MPEG has indeed arrived, and in a major way," said Sean O'Toole, product manager of Xing Technology. "The multimedia marketplace has been waiting for affordable high-quality digital video, and now it's here: Xing's MPEG player and accelerators like ProMotion are the enabling technologies that will bring high quality video to the desktop. "We are especially pleased that Alliance has provided the necessary video acceleration features at such an aggressive price point. Soon everyone who buys a new multimedia PC will have instant access to MPEG playback at virtually no added cost." "Xing has achieved what others said was impossible: full-motion, full-quality MPEG-1 decode without expensive MPEG hardware," said Sid Agrawal, vice president of marketing at Alliance. "OEMs are scrambling to provide this functionality, and with the combination of Xing software and Alliance ProMotion hardware, MPEG playback will become a required feature of multimedia PCs." Software MPEG MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group (compression, standard, algorithm, file format, body) Moving Picture Experts Group - (MPEG, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29 WG11) An ISO committee that generates standards for digital video compression and audio. Also the name of their algorithms. ) is the international standard for compression of digital video and audio. It has been widely accepted by the television broadcast, consumer electronics and entertainment industries as the standard for digital electronic distribution of video programming. MPEG provides for high quality 30 frames-per-second video and 44 kHz 16-bit audio in highly compressed digital format. Until now, PC-based MPEG playback has relied on special-purpose decoder boards. A typical decoder board includes a decompression, processor, video memory, and hardware and software to interface to a graphics card. Total OEM cost is over $100, with retail prices over $200. Software MPEG uses the personal computer processor to perform decompression, removing the need for expensive add-in video decoders. Because decompression is very compute-intensive, software MPEG has never been able to achieve the full-quality, full-motion display that users demand. Xing MPEG Player The Xing MPEG Player breaks this bottleneck with highly optimized software, and by fully utilizing advanced features of new generation of graphics accelerators that are shipping this season. Xing's software uses the Microsoft/Intel Display Control Interface (DCI (Display Control Interface) An Intel/Microsoft programming interface for full-motion video and games in Windows. It allowed applications to take advantage of video accelerator features built into the display adapter. ) standard to access video acceleration features. Performance will be optimal on Pentium-class systems equipped with graphics chips that offer hardware DCI video acceleration, like ProMotion. The Xing MPEG Player product includes a digital video player See portable media player, portable DVD player and media player. with GUI (Graphical User Interface) A graphics-based user interface that incorporates movable windows, icons and a mouse. The ability to resize application windows and change style and size of fonts are the significant advantages of a GUI vs. a character-based interface. interface, a variety of MPEG-1 title excerpts, and an MCI (1) (Media Control Interface) A high-level programming interface from Microsoft and IBM for controlling multimedia devices. It provides commands and functions to open, play and close the device. (2) (Microwave Communications Inc. driver, all on a single CD-ROM CD-ROM: see compact disc. CD-ROM in full compact disc read-only memory Type of computer storage medium that is read optically (e.g., by a laser). . The Microsoft Windows MCI driver included with the Xing MPEG Player product allows playback of MPEG video audio or system streams from within Microsoft's Media Player as well as from other applications and titles. The driver supports the MPEG MCI command set originally referred to as OM/1. The Xing MPEG Player product, first publicly demonstrated last month, is scheduled to ship to OEMs in December. Pricing from Alliance will be below $10 in OEM quantities. ProMotion-3210 MMUI Accelerator ProMotion-3210 is the first single-chip Windows accelerator with built-in hardware acceleration for motion video colorspace conversion and scaling under DCI. ProMotion-3210 accelerates video and 3D applications written for Video for Windows The name of Microsoft's first video playback implementation in Windows. Supporting the AVI movie format, Video for Windows (VfW) was installed separately in Windows 3.x, but was later built into Windows 95 and subsequent versions. , WinG, 3DR and other DCI-compatible multimedia interfaces, as well as all home and business graphics applications under Microsoft Windows. ProMotion-3210 accelerates Windows displays up to 1600x1200 resolution at 8 bits per pixel (hardware, graphics) bits per pixel - (bpp) The number of bits of information stored per pixel of an image or displayed by a graphics adapter. The more bits there are, the more colours can be represented, but the more memory is required to store or display the image. , and up to 800x600 resolution at 24 bits per pixel truecolor. It offers PCI (1) (Payment Card Industry) See PCI DSS. (2) (Peripheral Component Interconnect) The most widely used I/O bus (peripheral bus). Local Bus or VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association, Milpitas, CA, www.vesa.org) A membership organization founded in 1989 that sets interface standards for the PC, workstation and computing environments. Note the following VESA standards following this entry. VLBus host interface, and supports 1 to 4 megabytes of DRAM memory. Even with just 1 megabyte of memory, it can accelerate full-screen, 1024x768 graphics and 30 frames per second motion video playback. ProMotion-3210 is priced at $19 in 25,000 piece quantities, making it less expensive than comparable graphics-only accelerators; yet it provides features equivalent to competing two-chip graphics + video solutions. ProMotion-3210, which was announced in July, is currently in production. Company Backgrounds Xing Technology Corp., headquartered in Arroyo Grande, Calif., has been an active participant on the MPEG standards committee and a leading developer of international standards-based data compression and communications technologies for multimedia. Xing's core technology and desktop products enable OEMs, developers and end-users to integrate words, sound, still and moving pictures into cost-effective PC-based business, education and training tools. Alliance Semiconductor Corp., based in San Jose, Calif., is a leading worldwide supplier of high performance memories and related products. Alliance designs, develops, manufactures and markets CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) Pronounced "c-moss." The most widely used integrated circuit design. It is found in almost every electronic product from handheld devices to mainframes. VLSI VLSI: see integrated circuit. (1) (Very Large Scale Integration) Between 100,000 and one million transistors on a chip. See SSI, MSI, LSI and ULSI. (2) (VLSI Technology, Inc., Tempe, AZ, www.semiconductors. products using the latest manufacturing technologies, with feature sizes down to 0.5 micron. The company markets its high performance products to the desktop and portable computing, networking telecommunications and instrumentation industries. Alliance Semiconductor's common stock is listed on NASDAQ NASDAQ in full National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations U.S. market for over-the-counter securities. Established in 1971 by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), NASDAQ is an automated quotation system that reports on under the symbol ALSC ALSC Association for Library Service to Children ALSC Adirondack Lakes Survey Corporation ALSC Afloat Logistics and Sealift Capability ALSC American Lumber Standards Committee, Inc. ALSC Advanced Logistics Systems Center (AFMC) . -0- Note to Editors: ProMotion and the Alliance logo are trademarks of Alliance Semiconductor Corp. Xing, the Xing logo, and Xing MPEG player are trademarks of Xing Technology Corp. Microsoft is a registered trademark and Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corp. Pentium is a trademark of Intel Corp. Other trademarks are property of their respective holders. Alliance's ProMotion-3210 MMUI accelerator and Xing Technology's Xing MPEG Player will be on display in a suite at the Alexis Park Resort in Las Vegas during Fall Comdex, Nov. 14 - 18, 1994. Limousine service to and from the suite will be provided. Please contact Spencer Greene at Alliance, 408/383-4900, by Nov. 11 to schedule a demo. During Comdex week, contact Stacey Huggins, at 408/383-4900 for arrangements. CONTACT: Alliance Semiconductor
Spencer Greene, 408/383-4900
Xing Technology
Sean O'Toole, 805/473-0145
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