From: nwickham@nyx.cs.du.edu (Neal Wickham)
Subject: Re: A Commodore Engineer speaks out.
X-Disclaimer: Nyx is a public access Unix system run by the University
	of Denver for the Denver community.  The University has neither
	control over nor responsibility for the opinions of users.
Keywords: Reverse Enginneering AGA - can it be done?
Reply-To: nwickham@nyx.UUCP (Neal Wickham)
Organization: Nyx, Public Access Unix at U. of Denver Math/CS dept.
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 92 04:13:49 GMT

In article <1992Oct11.161950.25434@cs.mcgill.ca> jerry@cs.mcgill.ca (Gerald (Jerry) KUCH) writes:

>I'd be very curious as to the specs on any
>Apple home TV/CD device.   


The Apple Performa CD-ROM machines are just basicly LCs and SIs with CD-ROM.
They are not things to be hooked to anyones TV.  I just meant that the
CD versions of the Performas look like a CDTV in that they come with the
CD-ROM drive built in.


>Are you talking about Windows for Workgroups?  This has been talked about
>in the PC rags with varying levels of detail and correctness.


Yes... Windows for Workgroups.  It sounds like it is impressive though
and will soon be a new business standard.  Mircosoft is going to push it
big time and they've got the kind of bucks and expertise to push pretty
damn hard. 

>
>I still haven't laid eyes on a real one.  HAM8 has great potential... the
>bandwidth involved in animating it will be so much lower than animating
>true 24 plane graphics, and the images are likely to not be especially
>distinguishable, especially given that the screens don't even have 
>16 million pixels...


In my hunble non-expert opinion, if Amiga can do full digital video, it 
will create a new market of home DTV.  If for $3000 dollars or so, one
can digitize several minutes of video from High-8, SVHS, or whatever
and monkey around with it on a hard drive and then dump it off back to
an analog medium (probably VHS) or onto digital tape for more editing
later, every upper middle class man who owns a video camera will just have
to have one. 

I've read here on the net that the AGA 4000 can animate in HAM8 at 60fps
and I would think the potential is there for some slick digital video
editing systems.  I am not sure if HAM8 has any advantages over something
like jpeg compression w/24-bit display though. Or... over mpeg.  I am
guessing that mpeg would be hard to edit since frames are dependent on
one another. ...that some of the information in a frame is contained in
previouse frames.  But even so, it may not be hard to develop software
to cut and paste frames here and there even if it does have to extract
info from previous frames.  Or... what about a DCTV type digital/composit
display.  Maybe someone will come up with something better like Phillips
who have already developed a system in CD-I.  

I am certainly interested in any comments in digital video and the 
trade offs between HAM8, jpeg, mpeg, and DCTV/CD-I type displays because
affordable digital video editing and affordable digital video systems in
gerneral seem like "big deals" to me.  :)
 
How does file size compare between jpeg/24-bit and HAM8?  I know that
HAM8 decompression is not problem as far as CPU power goes. ...HAM is
just some encoding/decoding logic (I think).  What about further 
compression of HAM8? ...as in mpeg type compression where inforation
is shared between successive frames?  How big of a hard drive would be
needed to store 5 minutes of HAM8 video?  What is the meaning of life?
etc.? etc.?


                                    NCW
 


Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy