MPEG-FAQ 4.0:

What is the PCMotion Player ?

From: mailto:kothary@mprgate.mpr.ca">kothary@mprgate.mpr.ca"">mailto:kothary@mprgate.mpr.ca">kothary@mprgate.mpr.ca/A>>@optimage.comtml>/A>ki02.html.html.html>>html>/A>ki02.html.html>



Date: Wed, 06 Oct 93 16:12:22 PDT

I recently bought the Optibase PCMotion Player.  This is the real 
time MPEG 1 decompressor.  I have only tested it with a couple of 
clips so far but it seems to work very well.  The decoded picture is 
the best I have seen so far.  There are very few artifacts. The two 
clips I have tested to date are tigers.mps ( a system level stream 
they included with the board) and starwars.mpg (an older video level 
clip I had sitting around.) The tigers clip was very good while the 
Star Wars was not nearly as good.  I don't know if this reflects 
advances in encoder technology or that Optibase does some funny 
stuff with their files.  

The board was very easy to install and ran pretty much the first 
time.  The only problems I had with the company are that they are 
very difficult to contact and seem to be understaffed.  I constantly 
hear the excuse that Mr X has not been able to contact me because he 
is very busy since he is on N different projects.  Also they seem to 
be a funny company in that their employees seem to continually shift 
between their Isreal and two US offices.  As you can imagine, it is 
very difficult to contact people who constantly change continents!

The other big problem with the board is that it can only take data 
in through the ISA bus.  It is not clear how to use this sort of 
card in a network unless one is willing to dedicate the entire PC to 
just one application.  The bus on my PC seems quite full when I use 
this card.  I think using either a T1, MVIP, SCSI, etc interface 
might make a more usuable card.  

Overall, for the kind of money they want, it seems to be a 
worthwhile board except the utility is limited to evaluation of MPEG 
and some composing rather than watching actual movies since 
networking is weak.