Matsushita Electric Industrial today announced they have developed an MPEG-2 encoder chipset that uses only two LSIs -- the MN673794 for digital conversions and the MN85571AC for audio/video encoding -- achieving 12-hour recording times, higher picture quality, and greater power savings. This chipset is expected to accelerate continued growth in the global market for digital AV recording devices, such as DVD and AV-HDD recorders. Sample chipsets will be available in July 2001 at a price of 6,000 yen each.

The new chipset enables a recording time up to 12 hours long by incorporating Matsushita's original advanced digital video signal processing technologies for higher picture quality, especially at lower bit rates. By also uniquely incorporating mixed DRAM/analog and other high-integration technologies, all the AV encoding functions now fit onto just a single LSI, including functions for video pre-processing. The new chipset also drastically reduces power consumption from 7 watts to a mere 2 watts by tightly integrating what used to require six LSIs onto just two. Furthermore, whereas previous products could only handle NTSC signals, the new chipset employs Matsushita's original BurstLock DD technology to enable both NTSC and PAL signals to be processed with a single chipset, an innovation certain to appeal to the global marketplace.