Better Media Integration for Your PC

Rainer Mauth

Today's multimedia PCs feature sophisticated 3-D graphics boards, high-speed CD-ROM drives, and CD-quality 16-bit sound boards, but most don't include a full-featured TV tuner or video mixer. With the Scenic MXB multimedia extension board from Siemens Nixdorf, you can upgrade your PC to a top-quality multimedia play station. This PCI board lets you integrate up to eight additional sound or video sources, such as a VCR, a video camera, TV, teletext, stereo, radio, and MPEG streams from CD-ROM. It also includes software that lets you mix these signals and perform basic editing functions.

You can program the integrated teletext decoder using a simple scripting language to capture information and broadcast to other Windows 95 a pplications. The system also automatically creates a table of all available TV programs, thus eliminating the need to searc h TV channels manually. In contrast to other PC TV tuners, it allows for fully scalable video windows of up to 1024 by 576 pixels.

Two options are available: an audio piggyback board with digital signal processing (DSP), and an infrared remote control. The audio DSP upgrade adds echo, reverberation, and 3-D surround sound and even allows you to run old DOS-based games in combination with these special sound effects.

If you want to turn your Win 95 PC into a multimedia play station, the Scenic MXB is an excellent choice. But before you buy it, make sure your PCI graphics board has more than 2 MB of video memory.

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Where to Find

Scenic MXB......................Starts at DM 400

Siemens Nixdorf
Augsburg, Germany
Phone:    +49 821 804 2692
Fax:      +49 821 804
 2026
Internet: 
http://www.scenic.de

Circle 1018 on Inquiry Card.

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Scenic MXB

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