Competing media formats are fragmenting the recordable DVD player market, but chipmakers say the standards war will not keep them from delivering silicon, driving down costs, and adding new features.
Despite a prolonged debate over which recordable DVD format --DVD-R, DVD-RAM, or DVD+RW -- will win out, suppliers interviewed here last week at the Consumer Electronics Show said they will deliver volume IC shipments to support any or all of the standards.
“The chip guys don't care because all they're worried about is [front-end] encoding data rates and the interface into the drives,” said analyst Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research, Tiburon, Calif.
Before they worry about which of the three standards they must accommodate, IC vendors have more fundamental issues to address such as refining their progressive scanning and recordable playback technologies. By comparison, tweaking algorithms to configure the DVD controllers for the three recordable standards is a relatively straightforward process, several suppliers said.
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