Reference Design Speeds Personal Video Recorder Development December 2000 Issue Published Date: December 01, 2000
The Time Machine reference design is a complete audio/video record and playback platform for developing personal video recorders (PVRs). Time-shifting PVRs provide on-demand television viewing with pause, freeze frame, single frame advance, slow motion, rewind and instant replay of live broadcasts as well as video recording and playback. At the heart of this system, the SM2210 codec is a real-time MPEG-2 video encoding and decoding IC using proprietary pre- and post-processing algorithms with a single-pass variable bit rate MPEG-2 encoding technique. The architecture of the Time Machine reference design can operate with various storage technologies besides hard disks: CD-RW, DVD-RAM or removable storage. The reference design comes with software/firmware, schematics, bill of materials (BOM), Gerber files, and technical documentation. The Time Machine reference design is priced at $25,000 and the SM2210 video codec is $49 each/4,000.
