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From: rad@mbunix.mitre.org (Richard A. Dramstad)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: MicroTV for your MacII ($395) (sorta long)
Keywords: on-screen video, neat stuff
Message-ID: <63255@linus.UUCP>
Date: 11 Aug 89 21:41:02 GMT
References: <4008@shlump.nac.dec.com> <27582@srcsip.UUCP>
Sender: news@linus.UUCP
Reply-To: rad@mbunix (Dramstad)
Organization: The MITRE Corporation, Bedford, Mass.
Lines: 93

In article <27582@srcsip.UUCP> mnkonar@src.honeywell.com (Murat N. Konar) writes:
>In article <4008@shlump.nac.dec.com> phil@vaxphw.dec.com (Phil Hunt) writes:
>>It is amazing how the minute you add the word 'computer' to a discussion, 
>>$400 becomes 'low price'!!
>>
>>How much would YOU pay for a 3" B&W television that is not a computer
>>television.  I mean, I have seen Sony Watchmans for $59 with 3" screens
>
>If they support copy and paste I'll take one! :^)

	This has been an interesting thread of discussion.  I spent
about twenty minutes in the Aapps booth at MacWorld on Tuesday, and
then spent a while longer in their hospitality suite at the Marriott
that evening.  (I must say, it was a *nice* hospitality suite...)
Aapps was accepting orders at the show, and there were a lot of people
throwing credit cards at them ready to order, even though it's at
least a couple months before they make their initial production runs.
It's mostly off the shelf components, which accounts for the
relatively low price (for a computer board).

	There's a lot of curiosity about this (soon to be) product, so
I'll throw my two cents worth of observations in:  Yeah, it supports
cut and paste.  Bring up the MicroTV application, use the mouse to
tune in the channel you want, hit the space bar, and Judge Wopner's
(sp.?) face shows up on your clipboard to paste into your law course
home work.  (Make sure your word processor can handle/print gray scale;
MacPaint-like one-bit deep programs need not apply.)  The MTV card
(the Aapps folks had on their "I want my M(icro)TV" buttons at
MacWorld) has audio out, too.

	It's cable ready, and will also accept input from other video
sources.  At the show, they were using a laser disk with Top Gun on it;
in the suite they were using a Sony Walkman VCR/TV for input, along
with a video camera.  Doing a paste from a videotape and then doing
the same from the live camera shots makes for some interesting
documents.  

	The display gets refreshed about 28 times/second (less than
TV), but was viewable.  The video refresh stops/slows whenever there's
a Macintosh interrupt, and there are a lot of those happening on a Mac,
of course, when you're doing anything other than just watching the
MicroTV.  (Just doing a mouse down freezes the video; other activities
like disk IO probably does the same.)

	When I asked, the Aapps folks said you could put more than one
card in (the software probably doesn't support that yet; I don't
know), but each card while running takes about 30% of the Mac's CPU (I
think we're talking plain Mac II here, not 68030 Macs), so there are
some limitations -- I don't think you want to have a Mac with a video
card and 5 MicroTVs just so you can watch five channels at once.

>But seriously folks, the other cards I've heard of that can do this kind
>of thing were in the 1 to 3 thousand dollar range.

	Some of the cards you might be referring to include the Mass
Micro Color Space II/Color Space FX boards or the Orange Micro Personal
Vision frame grabber.  Yeah, they're around $2K, like you said.
MicroTV really addresses a different market, though, I'd say.  The
{Mass,Orange} Micro cards are for relatively high quality color video
production; I don't think 128x96 grey scale pixels falls into the same
category.  The MicroTV Professional is still a long way from this type
of system, too.

	So, how would you use the MicroTV?  Yeah, you could have your
soap operas come on automatically (isn't there some Mac init that will
launch a program at a certain time?  In this case, "program" takes on
a whole new meaning...), but Phil Hunt is right, you can get a lot of
TV these days for ~$400 -- big screen monitor with stereo, etc., and
the MicroTV is not how you'd want to watch Star Wars (Casablanca maybe,
but not colorized).

	Some more far out possibilities were raised:  Use the MicroTV
with a videodisk to provide on-screen video help under program
control.  Or, use Timbuktu (which only sends changes, not the entire
screen image), to remote your video, which might be coming from the
camera sitting on top of your Mac aimed at you.  Videophone, anyone?
Think of the possibilities for user support!  I think the MicroTV is
one of those technologies that seem like a toy at first, but one that
will really grow on people, once they figure out how to use it.

	They didn't show the SE version or the Professional version at
MacWorld, as far as I know.

	To avoid the obvious question, Aapps' phone # is (800)446-6393, or
in CA it's (415) 961-4033.  They're in Mountain View.

>Murat N. Konar        Honeywell Systems & Research Center, Camden, MN
>mnkonar@SRC.honeywell.com (internet) {umn-cs,ems,bthpyd}!srcsip!mnkonar(UUCP)

Dick Dramstad
rad@mitre.org

Disclaimer:  No endorsement, but lots of interest.  Your mileage may vary.