BHA has announced the “XVD” software encoder, a new video encoding utility for small size and quality output. The size of the software is only 1.3MB and is compatible to Windows Me/2000/XP OS. The XVD (eXtended-play Video Disc) codec was originally developed by DigitalStream-USA The software uses two individual algorithm, one for video data compression and one more for sound compression. The compression settings can be set either for high quality output or a lighter one, to be used for other applications, such as a streaming transmition.

Up to two hours of high quality video can be stored to a DVD removable disc, under the XVD format. Encoding to XVD can be performed by drag and drop an AVI file to the window of the XVD software encoder. Video quality and sound quality settings are available in the main software window, among with settings for one or single pass encoding, setup for the VBR, etc.

An AVI file (720x480 / 20sec/ 700kbps) is encoded to the XVD format in about 4:30min and the size of the produced file is 2.38MB.

The current beta version of the XVD can be downloaded in the following page. User's registration is needed for download. A full version will be available later this summer.