DVD DECODING MOVES FROM HARDWARE TO SOFTWARE

摘要

Just two years ago, it seemed far-fetched to think that software rather than hardware would take over the MPEG-2 decoding task. This year, however, almost all PC digital-versatile-disk (DVD) sales will rely on the host CPU to handle the lion's share if not all of the decoding. Some graphics chips and even a planned Cyrix μP have added motion-compensation functions and even inverse-discrete-cosine-transform (IDCT) blocks in hardware, and these additions allow lower end PCs to offer software-decoding capabilities.