Video magic

Can’t decide which DVD movie to buy at the video store? You’ll soon be able
to see clips from DVD movies just by waving the shrink-wrapped box through a bar
code reader. Video Browser, developed by the German disc-pressing company
Sonopress, combines video-on-demand technology with the system that already lets
you hear extracts from music CDs. Sonopress collects DVD trailers, compresses
the video data by a factor of 10—to 0.5 megabits per second—and
stores it on a server which feeds video to the shops.