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Mon, 23 Sep 1996

JP/Taking a look at alternatives in the MPEG world

Taking a look at alternatives in the MPEG world

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): You might still remember my articles on the MPEG compression standard some time ago. MPEG stands for Motion Picture Expert Group. This compression standard enables us to reduce the visual and audio data to fit one hour of movie onto a single CD-ROM. The playback facility is both full-screen and full-motion, and the sound is of CD quality. In order to play it back on our PCs, however, we need to de-compress the data with MPEG hardware and software.

Incredibly, within just two years, MPEG has swept the PC world. I bought a RealMagic MPEG playback card in December 1994. At that time it was such a hot and exciting new product that I was willing to part with Rp 450,000 for one. I played karaoke CDs with it. I borrowed video CDs from friends and wasted a lot of productive time watching movies on my Sony monitor.

Today, MPEG playback has become almost a standard feature in new PCs. The rule is, if you have a CD-ROM drive, you should have MPEG playback capability. Many leading graphics card makers, such as Matrox and Diamond, even incorporate some MPEG capability into their cards, making it easier for you to watch movies while preparing a business presentation (although I wouldn't think a presentation prepared like this would be a knockout).

I had no problem with the RealMagic Lite card. Until I moved to Win 95, that is. When I made the move, I had to leave RealMagic Lite behind because the driver wouldn't work in the Win 95 32-bit environment. My friend Asali, who is a RealMagic whiz, told me that even the latest driver he had downloaded from Sigma Designs' web page would work only in Win 95's 16-bit environment. This means if I insisted on using RealMagic Lite with Win 95, I would have to run everything in the 16-bit mode. Of course, rather than putting my PC on a strict low-cal diet, I've chosen to put the card back into its box.

But because I enjoy singing so much, I had to get a replacement. So I bought top-of-the-line RealMagic Pro, which is already designed for Windows 95. At about Rp 650,000. RealMagic Pro remains the most expensive MPEG playback card on the market.

Fortunately, with the popularity of MPEG, there have been alternatives to RealMagic cards. They may be inferior in quality and features, but their prices are much lower. AcerMate, one of the more popular MPEG playback cards for Win 95, costs about Rp 180,000 in Glodok. Others, such as the ones from GVC, Vertos, and Boser, carry price tags between Rp 150,000 and Rp 200,000.

Still, if you don't want to buy any of these cards, you can use the software-based MPEG playback programs to watch your videos. Unlike the hardware-based MPEG playback, however, your video screen is generally limited to a stamp-sized window. With such a small display area, your eyes have to be very close to the screen in order to be able to see what Sharon Stone looks like in 'Last dance'. We'll have a brief look at RealMagic Pro and then we'll discuss two software-only MPEG playback programs.

RealMagic Pro

The RealMagic Pro card is truly plug-and-play. You install the card and start the PC. Win 95 will automatically detect it and ask you to insert the driver diskettes. I didn't encounter any problem installing it on my PC, which has a Matrox Millennium graphics card.

This Range Rover of MPEG playback card offers image enhancement, including horizontal and vertical filtering, support for 24-bit (16.8 million colors), as well as controls for brightness, contrast and saturation. These really improve the display quality, compared to RealMagic Lite or other brands.

Unlike its predecessor, RealMagic Pro doesn't use an internal feature-connector cable to pass the video signals from the graphic cards through it. Instead, the card comes with an External VGA Pass-Thru Cable. The sound quality is also good.

XingMPEG

As I said, you can also play an MPEG video file without the help of a hardware device, provided you have one of those software MPEG playback programs. The most popular one is XingMPEG Player from the California-based Xing Technology Corporation.

The software controls the playback of MPEG files by sending MCI commands to the XingMPEG Driver. Because most of these MCI commands are defined in the Microsoft's MPEG Command Set for the Media Control Interface (generally known as the "MCI MPEG Specification"), the XingMPEG Player can control any MCI driver that conforms to the MCI MPEG Specification (for example, an MCI driver provided with a hardware-based MPEG decoder). A few of the MCI commands used to control the XingMPEG Driver are custom commands (i.e., they are not defined in the MCI MPEG Specification), and any features of the XingMPEG Player that rely on these custom commands are disabled when another MPEGVideo driver is used.

I played around with Version 2.01, which ran smoothly in Win 95. The software has a diagnostics tool that will tell us approximately how many frames per second (fps) our PC is capable of showing. The ideal is 30 fps. It also has a what-if facility that will inform us what level of performance we could expect if we replace any of our PC's subsystems. For example, it will tell us whether we'll get the ideal frame rates if we replace our existing hard disk with a faster one.

XingMPEG Player's panel is quite sophisticated. As you can see on the left side of the accompanying picture, the panel has the all the necessary playback control buttons, a sliding volume control button, a mute and even a frame capture button. Unlike in RealMagic, you have to pause the playback before you can capture the frame. The captured frame can then be saved in a graphics file format. There's also a zoom button that will increase or decrease the size of the video display. On my Pentium 90 MHz PC, which has 40 MB of RAM but an old 240 MB Quantum ProDrive hard disk and a Cirrus Logic card, the machine always crashed if I tried to blow up the size. With 100% display size, which you can see in the picture, the movie ran pretty smoothly.

The panel can be turned into a bar, running at the bottom of the screen. If you like, you can simplify the panel so that it will show only the necessary buttons. You can also change the quality of the sound, too. Overall, the software is pretty neat.

I also played around with CompCore Multimedia's SoftPEG 2.0 from Visible Light, another software-based MPEG-1 decoder. This software installs drivers that add MPEG capability to Windows' Media Player.

As the result, you control the playback of the video file from inside Media Player. When I installed it on my Pentium 90 MHz, it overrode the XingMPEG drivers, so that when I ran XingMPEG Player afterwards the program used SoftPEG's drivers instead.

During installation, SoftPEG will detect which Windows your PC is running. In Win 95, it will automatically install the 32- bit version. You can order the full version from Visible Light.

Subjectively, there was not much difference between XingMPEG Player and SoftPEG MPEG Decoder in terms of their display quality. The problem with both of them is that they are good enough if you have a large display monitor. With a standard 14" monitor, your eyes will be tired before you finish watching one CD. On the other hand, if you're really into MPEG, you should go with RealMagic Pro. It's pricey, but it's the most fun.