A bit of new info about RT2000 on Matrox site

[DaddyBay]

Thank you Andrew. It sounds like you are tired of pointing this out to people, but it was new to me -- I hadn't noticed the DVxpress/DVxplore difference in the press releases. Many thanks.

I checked on C-Cube's site and found that the maximum bitrate in MPEG for the DVxpress-MX25 is 50 Mbits/sec (DV is 25 Mbits/sec), though Matrox has specified 25 Mbits/sec as the maximum for the RT2000.


[This message has been edited by DaddyBay (edited 10-05-1999).]

[DaddyBay]

I received a response from Matrox regarding software releases to improve the output speed of the RT2000 following the first release of the product. Quoting the relevant portion of the e-mail:

"With reference to your inquiry, yes, any updated RT2000 drivers will be available free of charge to Matrox RT2000 owners. These drivers would most likely be made available for download from our web site."

Not a surprise, but it gives me a warm feeling to know it for sure.

Thank you Matrox.

[Rob Morris]

Grigory,

Sorry, I took so long to reply,

I spent quite a bit of time with the ATI
MPEG2 recording capabilities last night.

About the only thing that can be done with MPEG2 with the ATI software is record an analog signal, then play it back with their DVD Player software. I found nothing which would allow for transcoding. Also their DVD playback software drops frames every time a disk access is made. If Windows media player is used the frame dropping does not occur, so its definitely in the playback and not in the recording.

I don't know if the same happens when playing a DVD-ROM, as there is none on this system. I might try burning an MPEG file on a CD-ROM to see if the effect is the same.

They have a 'video editor' which allows for cutting up a video stream, but does not allow for cutting an MPEG2 stream.

The MPEG2 recording software allows for specifying bit-rates from 400 kBits/Sec to
8 Mbits/sec, as well as the size of the group of pictures (GOP) and a parameter that has to do with motion estimation, although it is unclear what this parameter actually does. The parameter can be varied from 1-40.
At values > 10 (on the 550 Mhz PII) frames are dropped, so it may have something to do with the size of the neighborhood for motion estimation.

Hope that helps.

Rob

[andrewh]

The 50 Mbit/s is marketing hype. 25+25==50

You can have two 25Mbit/s streams decoded simultaneously. That is where they get their 50 from!! Very informative literature but I suppose we are all used to that. Just one example:

"Microsoft Windows 95 is an operating system ..."

Andrew