HEURIS MPEG Power Professional ported to Digital's Alpha Platform

HEURIS' MPEG Power Professional software for MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoding now runs on Digital Equipment Corporation's Alpha Platform

SIGGRAPH '97, Los Angeles, CA, August 5, 1997--HEURIS, a leading provider of MPEG encoding solutions for professional digital video applications, today introduced MPEG Power Professional for Alpha, software for MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 digital video compression. This product is the only MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoding software package commercially available on Digital Equipment Corporation's Alpha21164 and 2116PC platforms.

MPEG Power Professional for Alpha gives professional content creators and video application developers a cost effective alternative to MPEG encoding hardware while still providing high quality output suitable for a wide range of multimedia and video transmission applications. In addition, MPEG Power Professional's support of the Oracle Real Time Encoding API, allows for smooth integration of video services on Windows, Sun and Alpha platforms. (Please see separate release on support for the Oracle Video Server).

"More and more multimedia developers are turning to Digital Alpha platform," said Brian Quandt, President of HEURIS. "Multimedia developers are looking for serious processing power at a price they can afford. Alpha provides the kind of price/performance content creators are looking for."

"MPEG Power Professional is precisely the kind of visual computing application that shows off Alpha 21164 and 21164 PC systems at their industry-leading best," said Pat Hart, Alpha market development manager for Digital Semiconductor. "Digital video content developers have an insatiable appetite for speed, and the combination of the HEURIS software and Alpha hardware offers them a big boost in productivity that they can easily afford."

MPEG Power Professional for Alpha takes advantage of the MVI instruction set, developed by Digital to accelerate multimedia applications for the 21164PC and future Alpha microprocessors. Engineers at HEURIS have reported significantly faster encoding results using MPEG Power Professional on a 21164PC system containing MVI.

"Speed was a significant factor in the decision to move to the Alpha platform, says John Stone, senior software engineer at HEURIS. "We're seeing MPEG-1 encoding at SIF resolutions at less than 10-1 real time on the Alpha. MPEG Power Professional for Alpha is optimized to really take advantage of the Alpha architecture. We're very pleased with the results."

MPEG Power Professional for Alpha runs on Alpha workstations running the Windows NT operating system. Accepted video inputs include, OMF files and AVI files. Alpha workstations are available from Digital as well as from more than 20 OEMs. MPEG Power Professional is also available for Windows NT (3.51 and above), Windows 95 and Macintosh systems (7.5 or higher).

MPEG Power Professional for Alpha is available for $1,500 direct from HEURIS, through dealers and distributors. The product, currently in beta release is expected to ship within this quarter.

About HEURIS
Headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, HEURIS is a full-service provider of MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 digital video compression solutions for professional video and multimedia developers. HEURIS products and services are used to incorporate high-quality digital video into sales/marketing CD-ROMs, interactive kiosks, and corporate training presentations. Customers include McDonnell Douglas, Southwestern Bell, Hunter Engineering, Federal Express and Universal Studios. HEURIS can be reached via the Worldwide Web at: http://www.heuris.com

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