Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd has chosen Milpitas, California-headquartered C-Cube Microsystems Inc’s MPEG decoder for four models of VideoCD players to be launched in Japan this month under the Panasonic brand name. A portable player and a karaoke system with a 50-disk automatic changer are among the new models. By using the CL480VCD MPEG 1 System Decoder, only four chips need to be added to a standard CD digital audio player to convert it to a VideoCD player: the CL480VCD, a 4M-bit dynamic, a ROM and an NTSC/PAL video encoder, said C-Cube. According to figures from Mercury Research, 3.2m VideoCD players will be sold this year. VideoCD machines can play up to 74 minutes of audio and video from a single 4.7 disk.
