Audio Video News

When the hard-disk–based personal video recorder (PVR) products like TiVo and ReplayTV hit the shelves last year, they brought a new flexibility to time-shifting television programming. But the first products still had shortcomings: What could you do if you wanted to time-shift two programs from two different channels simultaneously? Buy two machines?

It was only a matter of time. Last week Broadcom introduced a dual-channel MPEG-2 encoder chip for the next generation of cable company personal video recorder (PVR) set-top boxes. Broadcom, which manufacturers chips used in PVRs, says that the new BCM7041 dual-channel digital video/audio encoder and multiplexer is the first single-chip, MPEG-2 encoder to enable the simultaneous compression of two independent video channels and four audio channels.

Broadcom's Rich Nelson states that "dual MPEG encoding is becoming a requirement to support 'watch and record' PVR. The BCM7041 dual channel encoder is a significant milestone in the evolution of the PVR set-top box market because it is the most cost-effective solution for the cable industry to offer wide-scale deployment of 'watch and record' digital set-top boxes to the consumer."

Broadcom says that dual tuner set-top boxes equipped with the new chip will allow the consumer to record one program while watching and time-shifting a different program, or to record two different programs simultaneously, for viewing later or at the same time within picture-in-picture (PIP). In addition, the company says, a viewer may record an interactive show and be able to take advantage of the interactive capabilities at a later time.

Scientific-Atlanta is reporting that it will incorporate Broadcom's BCM7041 into its new Explorer 8000 set-tops, offering the ability to compress two digitized video and four audio streams simultaneously, allowing them to be "watched and recorded," simply recorded, or simultaneously played back in a PIP. and will offer HDTV via memory options. SA says that, in addition to the PVR functions the 8000 supports Web browsing, email, t-commerce, and video-on-demand (VOD), and sports a built-in 40 gigabyte hard drive.