SENDING short video messages by e-mail鈥攄ubbed v-mail鈥攊s to become
a lot easier, thanks to a $99 system from Philips of the Netherlands.
Called Videogram, it comprises a simple colour video camera with built-in
microphone which plugs into a universal serial bus socket on a Windows 98
PC.
Using software called Videogram Creator, the user then clicks on an icon to
control the camera and hits the escape button to stop recording. Clicking on
鈥渟end鈥� then compresses the conventional AVI (video for Windows format) recording
by a factor of 100, so that a one-minute sound-and-video message can be stored
on a standard 1.4-megabyte floppy disc. The compressed file is then sent as an
ordinary e-mail message.
Previous v-mail systems have only worked if the recipient has matching
software to decode the sound-and-video file, but Philips bundles matching
playback software with the message and packages it as a small executable file.
The playback software works with any version of Windows. 鈥淰-mail will replace
e-mail in four or five years,鈥� predicts Hugh Brogan of Philips.
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