Xing Technology
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Xing Technology was a live audio broadcast software company founded in Arroyo Grande, California in 1989 by a former networking executive Howard Gordon. He had developed a simple library to offer JPEG decoding capabilities.
The software attracted the attention of Chris Eddy, who worked on a fast processing algorithm called discrete cosine transforms (DCT). Eddy's technique helped release the first Xing MPEG video player, as a simple MS-DOS application that could play back an I-frame video MPEG stream. The application was very selective on input and could decode streams of 160x120 resolution encoded using constant quantization frames. This has been an impressive performance to run on systems running on the 386 and Intel 486 processesor of that era.
On developing its business, Xing Technology staff expanded to seven employees.
Over the next several years, Xing followed multiple trends. Windows would benefit the performances of the MS-DOS MPEG player. Later Xing Technoology realease the first software MPEG audio decoder MP2 with patent considerations to the MP3 format, an MP3 encoder and a CD-grabbing package, a real time ISA 160x120 MPEG capture board (XingIt!), a JPEG management system (Picture Prowler) and finally moved into networking.
In the digital media network related products it created a handful of different products before settling down on StreamWorks, the first software product able to broadcast live video on a 24 hour-a-day basis to the Internet, that was also was the first broadcast software for audio streams, also to the Internet. A competitor RealVideo from RealNetworks appeared just before StreamWorks, but at that moment it could only broadcast pre-encoded video-clips and could not transmit live streams. Xing Technology experienced a period of expansion up to the late 90's through its MP3 software called Catalyst and MP3 Grabber.
In the year 1999 it was bought by RealNetworks and was quickly absorbed.
Howard Gordon died of a heart attack on July 20, 2010 at age 57[1].
References
- Bert J. Dempsey, Paul Jones Internet issues and applications 1997-1998. Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Md. 1998. ISBN 0810834308 (0-8108-3430-8)
Internet issues and applications 1997-1998 -