Zoran Corporation, a leading provider of integrated circuits and software for digital video and audio enabled by compression, announced the availability of a new addition to its Vaddis DVD decoder IC family - the Vaddis-VX. Vaddis-VX is a "video only" version of the leading Vaddis DVD decoder specifically targeted at the price sensitive PC market. The audio decoding is executed in software on the host CPU thereby eliminating the need for extra components, connectors, and cables and reducing system cost significantly to less than $20. Manufacturers who choose to use Vaddis-VX with Zoran's Vaddis4VMI reference design kit can start production immediately. The Vaddis-VX IC is now available in mass production.

The combination of Vaddis-VX with Zoran's leading SoftDVD Navigator and Zoran's proprietary software audio module provides the best of both worlds. Users can achieve the high performance video and sub-picture decoding associated with a hardware DVD solution and maintain low CPU loading while at the same time secure significant cost reduction through software based audio decoding. Several companies are now adopting this unique solution based on the Vaddis4VMIý daughter card reference design.

"We believe the introduction of Vaddis-VX with software audio decoding will expedite the adoption of hardware DVD decoding in the PC environment", said Dr. Shmuel Farkash, Vice President of Video Products for Zoran. "It is especially attractive for graphics daughter card solutions such as our Vaddis4VMI reference design card, where the absence of cables has strong advantages in installation, compatibility, and system cost ."

Zoran now offers a complete line of hardware and software solutions for PC DVD: from the full function hardware decoding with Vaddis ZR36700, to the all-software SoftDVD, and now a software-hardware hybrid solution with the Vaddis-VX and software audio. Manufacturers can now optimize a solution per desired system.

On the Vaddis DVD Decoder Family

The Vaddis DVD decoder family is the world's most advanced set of DVD solutions targeted at second generation consumer stand-alone DVD/VideoCD/CD-DA players and PC-based DVD systems. Based on Zoran's proprietary MPEG-2 video and Dolby-Digital audio decoding technology, the Vaddis family integrates the decoding and presentation functionality required for full implementation of the DVD standard in a single chip.

Vaddis-VX is a subset of the leading Vaddis 36700 DVD Decoder and includes DVD content protection (CSS), Program stream demultiplexing, MPEG-2 video, MPEG-1 video, Subpicture, OSD, Letterbox, Pan-Scan and more. Using a Zoran-proprietary implementation, the Vaddis decoder family requires only a single 16 Mbit SDRAM for full operation. Vaddis dramatically reduces the required number of memory chips and other components thereby lowering the power consumption and overall cost of a DVD system. Vaddis-VX with software audio further optimizes this solution on the PC by eliminating extra analog audio components and connection cables.

On the Vaddis4VMI Reference Design

Vaddis4VMI is a DVD daughter card design targeted for Intel740-based AGP graphics cards or any other VMI 1.4 standard based graphics card. VMI (Video Module Interface) provides a direct bi-directional high bandwidth connection for both DVD data and video from Vaddis to the graphics controller. Systems designed to take advantage of VMI can achieve high DVD performance at a lower cost than PCI solutions, because they do not require a dedicated PCI slot to add DVD functionality or cables to run from board to board. Furthermore, VMI eliminates loading of the PCI bus with video thereby improving system performance. Zoran's Vaddis4VMI reference card comes complete with a production ready set of software drivers that enables a short time to market.

The continuing change of the consumer appliance from today's standalone boxes is coming quicker than even I expected; it is being forced by the remarkable standards that PC99 -- at present in its draft form -- are forcing on computer manufacturers for the home entertainment sector. The thinking by Wintel is that in every case the standard of quality being looked for has to be at least equal to, and preferably better, than current standalone solutions in order to force the consumer to accept the PC solution most readily. But, of course, cost is always the major pressure on the manufacturers and the introduction of a new platform such as iMac swings further improbables into the mix to add confusion to the user. I have held off buying a DVD player because of the changing standards and the changing scene of ICs that are coming onto the market. Indeed I would fully expect the DVD player offerings to become extremely low cost -- less than $100 -- within the next 18 months and for them to all but disappear within 3 years.

The PC solution that Zoran suggests here using software for the audio decoding is fully approved by Dolby Licensing and does save not only the cost of silicon but also the connections to and from such a hardware decoder. The cost of the video-only decoder drops proportionately and the price that the PC manufacturers are really looking for -- about $12 -- becomes approachable. Zoran is well ahead in being able to break up the implementation into the separate hardware/software arenas and I believe this IC will become a standard in the next generation of PC-based players. Add to it the thinking behind getting the video signals out of the main bus by having the decoding on a daughter card to the graphics card and I think a lot of manufacturers will take this route of least resistance and I would forsee that this circuitry will be on the next generation of 740-based AGP graphics cards. This will be an extremely profitable product for Zoran.