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• ESPRIT Project #22981
• Acronym: VIPER

Participants

• Vitec SA [F], Co-ordinating Partner
• Myrica (UK) Ltd [UK], Partner

Objectives

This project aimed to promote the MPEG-2 digital video standard in the computer world by offering high performance and cost optimised technology and tools to achieve and support the video capture and compression process. The specific objectives of this 30-month ESPRIT project – which started in November 1996 – were the following items:

• Develop a high performance MPEG-2 single chip encoder/decoder for PCI boards in PC's, performing real time capture, compression, decompression and restitution of full screen, full colour and full speed video.
• Develop an integrated system for real time MPEG-2 video capture, compression, decompression and restitution - and, with the accompanying storage subsystem, recording and replay - including a PCI add-on board together with Windows drivers and application software.
• Develop an external 3½" removable cartridge disk drive subsystem providing at least 4.5 GB capacity, and optimised for MPEG-2 video acquisition applications.
• Integrate all the components, together with suitable software and Windows drivers, into a DVD premastering demonstration system.

European links

The video aspects of this project benefited from the ATLANTIC project within ACTS, which concentrates on MPEG-2 editing tools and switching problems. To this end, a relationship was established between Vitec and the BBC (the prime contractor for ATLANTIC).

In the storage area, this project built on ESPRIT III's MagDrive project (EP 9257), in which Myrica, Nomaï and Acorn developed a 540MB removable magnetic cartridge drive – being marketed as the “MCD” (Multimedia Cartridge Drive). It also benefited from the work done in ESPRIT IV's AMAS project (EP 20922), where Myrica worked with Nomaï and Fast Multimedia to enhance the MCD for use in Audio-Video applications. 

Approach

VITEC intended to develop a second generation VLSI, able to encode (and decode) MPEG-2 with high quality at a very low cost.  To achieve this objective, they were to develop an ASIC optimised for the application, taking advantage of the power of the PC environment to minimise the silicon required.  The VIPER project was to develop such a VLSI, as well as a complete PC add-on board and supporting software to make full use of the chip's capabilities in MPEG-2 video acquisition applications.

One thing that characterised such digital video applications more than anything else was the huge volume of data that needed to be moved around at high speed - all of which eventually had to be stored somewhere.  The constraints that this placed upon then-current storage devices overwhelmed them. Tape drives were extremely slow to access, whilst CD-ROM and optical drives could not maintain the data transfer rates required.

The only technology that came close to achieving the transfer rates and access times required for digital video was the well established magnetic hard disk drive. However, in spite of the enormous advances that had been made in the technology, these machines did have a finite capacity - even the biggest drives of 4 GB or more could soon become totally filled. What was clearly needed was an extension of this technology into a device that had unlimited capacity. Such a device was the removable cartridge magnetic disk drive, where it was quite easy to use dozens of cartridges if necessary to cover several different applications or many different projects.

Myrica was Europe's only company specialising in the development of removable cartridge magnetic disk drives, and would support VITEC in the development of their codecs by producing an external high-capacity storage subsystem optimised for VITEC's target MPEG-2 video acquisition applications.

As an example of one possible application for the tools being developed within the project, the consortium was also to produce a demonstration system for premastering of DVD's - a potentially huge emerging market.