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San Francicso -- ViXS Systems announced a partnership with PLX Technology, Inc. to develop a dual-stream, USB-connected PC-TV tuner card reference design. Leveraging ViXS' XCode II-L MPEG encoder, the PLX NET2282 Hi-Speed USB peripheral controller and PLX Remote PCI (RPCI) development tool, the reference design will enable manufacturers to develop standalone products for consumers to easily convert desktop PCs or laptop PCs into multimedia PCs without the inconvenience of installing an aftermarket PC-TV tuner board.

PLX and ViXS will be demonstrating this new reference design at the Intel Developer Forum, August 23-25, at the Moscone Center West, San Francisco.

"ViXS' advanced video technology, XCode II-L, has the unique ability to support multiple streams of high-quality video at low bit rates, and its high-speed transrating and transcoding made it an obvious choice for this reference design," said Jimmy Chou, product marketing manager at PLX Technology. "Through this partnership, consumers can expect to see standalone, USB-connected dual TV tuner products from manufacturers that provide the ability to instantly transform any PC or laptop with a USB connection into a multimedia PC."

The PLX NET2282 peripheral controller simplifies the conversion of existing PCI add-in cards to the standalone USB 2.0 designs. The controller's versatility and ease of design is further enhanced by support from several operating systems. The RPCI interface, similar to that of PCI, provides a simple driver-conversion tool for Microsoft Windows(R) 2000 and Windows XP drivers for PCI-based board designs using the NET2282 controller. Included in the PLX NET2282's rapid development kit, the RPCI allows driver developers to begin test and development work on NET2282-equipped PCI boards without the need to learn USB drivers.

ViXS' XCode II-L can efficiently compress and scale analog video, or re-compress and scale High-Definition (HD) digital video, and then transfer multiple video streams for storage or display on any display device. The encoding features of XCode II-L enable it to distribute high-quality video content at under 1.25Mbps. The XCode II-L video processor also offers unparalleled high-speed transrating and transcoding, allowing users to downrate and "burn" video content at a rate of 8X to 24X real time.

"PLX provides an extremely robust and cost-effective PCI-to-USB solution, and it is particularly well suited to co-exist with the ViXS offering," said Shawn Saleem, vice president and co-founder of ViXS Systems. "The USB market holds a large share of the total TV tuner cards sold worldwide. This collaboration with PLX gives us an immediate entry point into a significant market in the home networking industry."

SOURCE: ViXS Systems