|
Overview Digital video and audio compression has turned most of the content that we absorb into digital bitstreams. Unfortunately the size of those streams is still fairly large, requiring mass media storage devices. In order to distribute this content at a cost effective price, the content provider has a limited number of options: tape, CD and now DVD. The question is.... "Could we use those media's to deliver highly interactive games or films without radically modifying the installed base hardware?" The answer is ..... iMotion. What is iMotion? iMotion is a patent pending technology developed by Cinax Designs to splice MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 streams, seamlessly, on the fly without creating any MPEG artifacts. iMotion software overcomes the issue of head seek latency in digital video based content delivery systems. It achieves this through an intelligent use of buffering and caching systems, combined with a proprietary scripting language for interactive branching. In the case of CD or DVD it results in the user perceiving a head seek time of 0 ms. While the DVD 1.0 specifications as implemented result in seamless transitions between streams, these cuts are not instantaneous. There will be a delay between the user selection and the DVD player response. The iMotion technology offers the possibility of superior performance and product differentiation, especially to developers of video based content that benefits from advanced interactivity, such as interactive games, that demand instantaneous seamless branching of video. iMotion is an incremental technology, designed to be completely compatible with the DVD specifications. iMotion is also applicable to solving network latencies. The Technical Challenge The worst case latency encountered on CD or DVD is a 300 ms head seek time. Today many people try to reduce this latency by optimizing the disposition of the files onto the disk image, minimizing the head seek time by having the streams physically disposed onto the disk in an optimal manner. In the case of linear media this solution may be sufficient, but in the case of interactive media there are additional obstacles. With interactive games it is almost impossible to foresee where, how and when the viewer is going to view the content, therefore traditional buffering and disk image optimization is of limited value. The rapid transition from one compressed stream to another sometimes results into artifacts at the output of the decoder. A fast video stream splice triggers instability in most decoders in a number of frames after the splice. iMotion, with its proprietary interactive language, its intelligent buffering system and its fast splicing techniques, approaches these technical challenges in an innovative and resource efficient method. iMotion in the PC Market iMotion is useable by any CD-ROM or DVD-ROM application created for the PC platform. It utilizes to its full extent, the memory and the decoding capability provided by the playback system. Hardware requirements are nominal; a 486 processor with 8MB of RAM memory is sufficient to use the iMotion technology, using hardware assist decode. iMotion is available to content developers via an licensable SDK produced by Cinax Designs Inc. iMotion in the Consumer Electronics Market iMotion is also relevant to VideoCD and DVD players. Using an adaptive hardware reference design, iMotion could be added to the existing hardware platform(s) with minimal additional memory required. We refer to this very appealing video gaming platform as DVD-G. iMotion could also be incorporated into a DVD chip itself, accompanied by the same memory requirements. This single chip solution would further enhance performance, while reducing manufacturing requirements and costs.
|