MJPEG Chip?

[paulus]

Anybody has the MJPEG chip for Dimension board?

Our research lab bought several Cubes in 1990 with the promise of that MJPEG chip for real-time video compression, but I never see one when the lab officially quit using NeXT in 1995.

Paulus

[blackcube]

Anybody has the MJPEG chip for Dimension board?

Our research lab bought several Cubes in 1990 with the promise of that MJPEG chip for real-time video compression, but I never see one when the lab officially quit using NeXT in 1995.

Paulus

Randy at Turbo Software has the only jpeg daughter card that I have heard of.

http://www.channelu.com/NeXT/Black/jpeg/index.html

[Korperlich]

Randy at Turbo Software has the only jpeg daughter card that I have heard of.

http://www.channelu.com/NeXT/Black/jpeg/index.html

Are those for real?  (as in genuine-NeXT) His page is the only bit of information I can find on these cards...

[rice0067]

They never made it to production.. but here is a short communication from when they were hopeful.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=103085.103097

Within it says that with the hardware  compression the ND should do video compression on standard SCSI at 600k/s at an "OK" reslolution and that good resolution would require "fast SCSI" or large memory cache.
This was in 1991. Those familiar with "back in the day" video editing will remember that you really needed a striped RAID array ala avid or video toaster to handle the bandwidth needed.

[mikeboss]

[pentium]

If I recall, the prototypes were also very buggy still when they were axed. You really don't want one.

[jroark]

Here is a pic with the C-Cube chip integrated on the ND.

[pentium]

WOAH.

What document did that come from?

[jroark]

The NeXT Product Family Specifications from 1991

[mikeboss]

found these pictures on archive.org

web.archive.org/web/20010119090600/http://www.channelu.com/NeXT/Black/jpeg/index.html

[mikeboss]

https://ia902205.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24/items/BYTE_Vol_15-12_1990-11_Compaq_Dazzling_New_Laptop/BYTE%20Vol%2015-12%201990-11%20Compaq%20Dazzling%20New%20Laptop_jp2.zip&file=BYTE%20Vol%2015-12%201990-11%20Compaq%20Dazzling%20New%20Laptop_jp2%2FBYTE%20Vol%2015-12%201990-11%20Compaq%20Dazzling%20New%20Laptop_0189.jp2

[Rob Blessin Black Hole]

Hello NeXT Community: 2 Questions as the main C Cube chips on this board are still in production and for sale cheap on eBay $9 .... even some new old stock ones.
1) If we make one lol and are the drivers in NeXTSTEP to support it?

I think the main issue is they we're running hot but perhaps cooling fan would help  ... and yes I saw the one that Randy had awhile back.

2) Is it possible to emulate it on Previous .... as that would be amazing.

[zombie]

Was it just heat that made the board fail? My understanding is the board would work for a few seconds and basically bomb the entire machine. Not sure "why". It's tough to imagine heat would get bad enough in a few seconds, and sounds like some more fundamental failure with the c-cube processor.

I agree, it would be cool to try and emulate this, as we might be able to do things in software that were just not possible in hardware back then?

Also, if we solved the problem in software, then perhaps we could reverse engineer some FPGA with today's tech and provide more than enough compression to make our own c-cubed replacement daughter cards that work better than the original ever could.