Ravisent Technologies Inc announced today that it has teamed with nVidia Corporation as a digital video launch partner for nVidia’s new GeForce2 GTSTM graphics processor unit (GPU). At this week’s Microsoft® Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2000 conference, the two firms combined their industry-leading solutions to demonstrate versions of RAVISENT’s CineMaster® family of integrated solutions for DVD, DVR and HDTV playback that are fully optimized for the GeForce 2 GTS – the first per-pixel shading GPU for the desktop PC market.

“We are pleased to be selected as a digital video launch partner for the GeForce 2 GTS, ” said Alan McCann, senior vice president and general manager for RAVISENT’s Personal Computer Division. “The combination of our state-of-the-art digital video software with the GeForce 2 GTS enables OEMs to immediately provide consumers with affordable PC digital video solutions delivering stunning visual
quality, equaling or surpassing that available with digital TVs costing thousands more.”

“The GeForce 2 GTS and RAVISENT combination provides a superior DVD, DVR and HDTV playback solution for PC users,” said Dan Vivoli, NVIDIA senior vice president of marketing. “With the introduction of the GeForce 2 GTS, PC OEMs and component manufacturers can be assured that the full video quality enabled by products like CineMaster can be realized on today’s PCs.”

Software CineMaster was developed using RAVISENT’s modular software architecture and is a high performance software based solution designed to decode DVD, MPEG-1 and Broadcast MPEG-2 video streams. The application shares the same robust software core of the CineMaster family of products that are in use by major PC OEMs, video graphics and video game manufacturers. Software CineMaster assists OEMs to meet rapidly changing consumers preferences in record time and at a low cost. Software CineMaster DVD is the first software-based DVD solution to deliver both decoding and encoding capabilities, as well as supporting cutting-edge HDTV (High Definition Television) decoding on multimedia PCs.