Confusing Press Releases - Matrox

Ever read a press release and get to the end and you still aren't sure what the product the press release is written about actually does? It's one of my pet peeves.

Matrox just sent out a press release: Matrox Enables State-of-the-Art HD Workflow for Quick News Delivery Using Matrox MXO2 Family of I/O Devices, and the two meaningful paragraphs seem to be:

Matrox® Video Products Group today announced Matrox Vetura Playback, a new application on the Mac for convenient playback of H.264 and .mov files using any of the Matrox MXO2 I/O devices. Field journalists equipped with a Matrox MXO2 device that includes the Matrox MAX H.264 encoding accelerator can shoot and edit their stories, then quickly encode to a very high quality H.264 file faster then realtime. Via any internet connection, the small H.264 file can be efficiently uploaded to headquarters then ingested to a video server or played directly to air using another MXO2 device and the Matrox Vetura Playback application.

"The new Matrox Vetura Playback application lets broadcasters leverage the power of Matrox MAX H.264 encoding acceleration to deliver breaking news stories to air in HD faster than ever before," said Wayne Andrews, Matrox product manager. "Matrox gives them the tools they need to scoop their competition."

From all that, the only part that really made any sense to me is this:
Matrox Vetura Playback, a new application on the Mac for convenient playback of H.264 and .mov files using any of the Matrox MXO2 I/O devices

Good stuff, but what's it really mean? Is the Matrox Ventura Playback simply hardware acceleration for playing H.264 files?

A search of the web revealed a lot of reprinting of the press release, but not much explanation. I did finally find this interesting blog entry from Andy Mees: Matrox prepping new MXO2 drivers (v1.9) and it says:
Ventura: It’s an all new standalone player app, and one of my favourite features of the new release ... open, view and playback your captured files directly on your big screen through the Vetura player with no need to fire up FCP or the like.
Ahh! Soooo, if you have a Matrox, with an external screen connected to it, and you want to play an H.264 video out to that screen, you can use Ventura Playback. I think I get it, though I guess I had assumed you could have done that with QuickTime Player if you can do it in Final Cut Pro...but I don't know.



Moving right along though, if you have a Matrox MXO2, be on the lookout for the firmware update, as it will include:
  • Core Audio Support
  • Active Format Description support
  • 16 Channel Audio support

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