| WHY THE HEREIN METHOD IS BETTER |
| The herein technique solves at once all the above difficulties as follows: 1. Tracks are recorded and read continuously, although heads step from one track to the next abruptly, by juxtaposing and merging all corresponding image elements on adjacent tracks. Thus, head-motion buffers are eliminated since the storage is made in essence trackless by said merging. 2. The recording is made partly digital with all image frames analyzed into a fixed set of discrete elements and partly analog by a pulse-length code. This combination permits maximum efficiency in disk usage. In addition, it allows implementing the merging of item1' and renders sound with perfect lip sync. 3. All heads are activated in playback thus dividing the storage into many movie epochs equal to the head number. Hence a client is simply connected to the head playing the wanted epoch, usually just prior to his movie's beginning, without added buffering or complexity. Thus, modifying drives is very feasible and the ensuing product will have many powerful features making it the best and most economical VOD storage. In many hotels, one of immediate applications where cables already exist and connect each client to a center, movies stored and read by drives will be replayed almost at once, at any order, and with almost no queue. Since the principle is the same, this product can also be the storage means for cable TV when separate station-to-viewer links become available. (Note that Cable TV cannot now offer the wanted movie at the wanted time because proper storage and individual links are both unavailable.) VOD Systems, large or small, are cost-effective to any client because they greatly improve the usage of his movie stock, raised by many times the salability of a movie, and will cost him less than conventional storage. |