Microsoft Announces Chipsets Will Support Windows Media 9


by Charles Fulton, Associate Editor


Microsoft has announced that several major manufacturers of digital media chipsets, including Equator, National Semiconductor, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments, will support Windows Media 9. These new chipsets will allow for the encoding and decoding of Windows Media 9 content in hardware.

Demonstrations of Windows Media 9 will take place at this year’s IBC show, and will include Equator showing decoding of a 720p (high-definition digital TV) signal.

Windows Media 9 is said to offer MPEG-2-like video quality with more efficient compression, typically one-third that of MPEG-2.