ATI, NVIDIA to Back 'Corona' in New Chipsets

In a major step towards broad adoption of the company's media codecs, Microsoft announced Tuesday that video card makers ATI and NVIDIA have signed on to support the upcoming version 9 of its Windows Media Technologies, code-named Corona. Corona video decoding will be embedded into new graphics chipsets, allowing for playback at six times the resolution of DVDs. The performance improvement will be due in part to DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) found in Windows XP, which has been enhanced to off-load video processing from the CPU to the graphics card.

Corona was announced late last year and is set to introduce two new advanced audio and video codecs. "Corona Video" boasts a 20 percent efficiency improvement and the ability to provide HDTV-like quality video at half the file size of a DVD. The new Windows Media Audio Professional codec will feature streaming 6-channel surround sound with full resolution 24bit/96kHz sampling.

"Windows Media 'Corona' is validation that Microsoft shares our goal of advancing the PC as an entertainment device," said vice president of marketing at NVIDIA, Dan Vivoli. "Corona is designed to harness the performance power of our graphics processor units (GPUs), resulting in a seamless home theater-quality experience on any desktop or notebook PC."

Earlier this month at NAB2002, Microsoft announced support for Corona in audio and video production software from Adobe, Creative, and others. DVD players from leading manufacturers will additionally ship with support for the next generation Windows Media codecs.

Corona will enter private beta testing late this summer and is slated for public release by the end of the year. DXVA support for Windows Media Video will be available in the final release of Corona.

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