Barco and Merging Technologies join efforts to present a HD JPEG 2000 Player & Ingester

Kortrijk, Belgium, and Genève, Switzerland -- 8 September 2009 -- Barco Silex, Barco's center of competence for embedded video coding electronic and design services, and Merging Technologies, the manufacturer of hardware and software systems for audio and video production professionals, have announced a collaboration to bring a HD JPEG 2000 Player & Ingester to the broadcast market. Merging Technologies leverages Barco's JPEG 2000 PCIe acceleration cards to extend the capabilities of its VCube HD player and ingest system, bringing to the broadcast market the sweet-spot between JPEG 2000 quality and cost-effectiveness for HD archiving, ingest and playback.

“Thanks to Barco's technology, we are proud to announce the extension of Merging's VCube non-linear HD video playback and ingest systems with the leading edge in hardware JPEG 2000 compression and decompression”, stated Dominique Brulhart, Merging's Head of Software Engineering. “We are confident that broadcast professionals will be delighted to benefit from HD ingest and playback in JPEG 2000 at high bit-rates and with unprecedented quality thanks to Barco's hardware acceleration.”

“We are excited to have Merging Technologies leverage our JPEG 2000 PCIe cards to deliver a cost-effective HD archiving and playback solution to the broadcast market”, said Théodore Marescaux, Video Business Manager at Barco Silex. “The versatility of the VCube is astonishing, be it in the supported codecs, in the varied capture and synchronization modes, or in the supported file formats: industry standards AVI or Quicktime and now ubiquitous broadcast standard MXF. By the same, Merging's VCube has a broad functionality range and can be used as a VTR replacement, for ingest, as a player or for transcoding.”

Merging Technologies is the manufacturer of hardware and software systems for audio and video production professionals. Merging's VCube is a universal hard disk based video player/recorder system. It can operate as a standalone unit, or as part of a multi-system network fully integrated with the Merging's Pyramix Digital Audio Workstation through standard Ethernet or with any other DAW through LTC, RS422 or MIDI. The VCube offers sync to PAL, NTSC, 24fps Film and all the HDTV frame rates at any resolution SD, 720p, 1080sf and 1080i. The VCube will be in demonstration this IBC at Merging's booth # 6.C29.

Barco Silex is a leader in contract engineering services, custom hardware and software development, as well as hardware IP core products. Its high quality JPEG 2000 IP cores are available standalone optimized for FPGAs and are the workhorse of Barco's DCPB family of JPEG 2000 acceleration PCIe cards. The DCPB cards cover a wide range of applications thanks to their versatility and unique performances. They offer both lossy and lossless JPEG 2000 encoding/decoding, support both 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 with up to 12-bits per sample and operate at HD resolutions and beyond. Barco Silex's history as custom electronic design house (ASIC, FPGA, DSP, BOARD) specialized in video coding goes back to 1991 and offers the best guarantee for continuous support throughout the complete lifecycle of products. Barco Silex's JPEG 2000 IP cores and PCIe cards will be in action at IBC on Barco's booth # 1.B33.

About Merging Technologies
Switzerland's Merging Technologies is the manufacturer of hardware and software systems for audio and video production professionals, including the high-resolution multichannel Pyramix digital audio workstation, VCube non-linear HD video playback system, the Ramses MSC audio control surface and Ovation a Media Server and Sequencer. Merging's products are used where reliability and the highest possible quality are of paramount concern. Merging's clients include some of the finest recording studios, broadcast facilities, post-production houses and film dubbing suites in the world. For additional information, please visit http://www.merging.com.

About Barco
Barco, a global technology company, designs and develops visualization products for a variety of selected professional markets. Barco has its own facilities for Sales & Marketing, Customer Support, R&D and Manufacturing in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. Barco (NYSE Euronext Brussels: BAR) is active in more than 90 countries with about 3300 employees worldwide. Barco posted sales of 725 million euro in 2008.