CHATSWORTH, Calif., April 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- MRV COMMUNICATIONS, INC. , a leading provider of products and services for out-of-band networking, WDM and optical transport, metro Ethernet, fiber optic components, 10GE and other service aware networking products, today announced a new family of digital video fiber optic transceivers that allow transport of uncompressed high-definition video over standard fiber optic networks.

The new Digital Video SFP family enables post-production facilities and rich-media studios to transport HD-SDI video over dark fiber using networking gear from any vendor that supports the small form factor pluggable (SFP) standard.

One market opportunity is to allow post-production facilities to share uncompressed baseband HD and SD video throughout a metropolitan area, a possibility now under consideration at Broadway Video. "I was impressed at how easy it was to transport HD & SD video in the same system that offered GigE and Fibre Channel connectivity," said Dirk Van Dall, General Manager, Broadway Video Digital Media Services, one of New York's leading design and post-production services companies and a major independent producer of television and film entertainment. "With MRV equipment, a high speed data link between diverse operations can do 'double-duty' as an uncompressed HD baseband connection. We can even set the system up to have both high-speed data and HD/SD baseband concurrently. It's seamless and well integrated into their system, and an extremely versatile way to link locations."

In customer tests, MRV Digital Video SFPs were used to transmit uncompressed SDI and HD-SDI between Sony HDW-F500 (HDCam) and Panasonic HD3700H (D5) tape deck pairs over 21 kilometers of single-mode dark fiber. The benefit is both flawless fidelity and a dramatic cost savings for HD video distribution from both lower network building, transmission infrastructure costs and from a reduced need for HD decks that used to shuttle tapes between locations.

Each MRV Digital Video SFP has a coaxial cable connector that takes a Digital Video feed from a camera or production system, and feeds it into an SFP-based system that converts the sight into a fiber optic signal. The MRV's SFPs are available for the DVB-ASI (270 Mbps) standard, the SDI (270 Mbps) standard, and both the PAL/SECAM (1.485 Gbps) and NTSC (1.4835 Gbps) standards of HD-SDI.

"As HD content becomes the norm in more industries, the limitations to transporting it on a network have a bigger impact on budgets and on turnaround time for projects," said Noam Lotan, MRV President and CEO. "We wanted to mark MRV's debut into the video networking marketplace with these SFPs because they so strongly change the equation making transporting video over a fiber network as easy and cost-effective as any other protocol."

MRV's Digital Video SFPs use a patent-pending encoding algorithm based on the EG-34 industry standard to transport SDI (SMPTE 259M and 344M) and HD-SDI (SMPTE 292M) data. Both SDI and HD-SDI create pathological data signals -- long series of either 1 or 0 data -- that cannot easily be transported over enterprise -- and telecom-class fiber optic equipment that requires a more balanced data flow.

DIGITAL VIDEO SFP BUILDS COMPLETE UNCOMPRESSED HD VIDEO NETWORKS

Because they are SFPs, the MRV Digital Video Transceivers can be installed in fiber optic systems from a wide variety of manufacturers including fiber optic cross connects and wave division multiplexers, which have adopted this MSA transceiver standard. By combining the transceiver with MRV's own fiber optic cross connect and wave division multiplexing (WDM) systems, production facilities can create a wide range of HD networking systems:

* The Digital Video SFP can be teamed with MRV's Fiber Driver(R), Lambda Driver(R) WDM or any other optical transport products to build digital video-enabled fiber optic networks for enterprises and service providers with metropolitan area networks. The addition of digital video support complements the systems' telecom data centric capabilities covering any digital protocol up to 2.7 Gbps, as well as extensive 10 Gbps solutions. * For intensive video networking needs, the Digital Video Transceiver can be used in MRV's Media Cross Connect to create a video matrix router, allowing full-speed bi-directional video transmission between video sources and multiple editing stations. The Media Cross Connect video matrix router can be expanded from 32 ports to 288 ports and supports any video signals up to 4.25 Gbps, as well data and storage networking protocols. * For point-to-point wireless applications, the Digital Video SFP can be used with MRV's TereScope line of free-space optics (FSO) wireless transmission systems to link two building up to 2 kilometers apart with digital video services. The digital video-enabled TereScope solution is the only FSO offering available that supports both digital video and enterprise data packets on the same link. AVAILABILITY

All MRV Digital Video SFPs, ordering code MRV-OP-SDISFP, are currently available through MRV solution provider partners. For more information, go to http://www.mrv.com/product/MRV-OP-SDISFP/.

About MRV Communications, Inc.

MRV Communications, Inc. ("MRV") is a leading provider of network equipment and services, and optical components. MRV's networking business provides equipment used by commercial customers, governments and telecommunications service providers, and includes switches, routers, physical layer products and out-of-band management products as well as specialized networking products for aerospace, defense and other applications including voice and cellular communication. MRV's optical components business provides optical communications components for metropolitan, access and Fiber-to-the- Premises applications, through its wholly owned subsidiary LuminentOIC, Inc. MRV markets and sells its products worldwide through a variety of channels, including a dedicated direct sales force, manufacturers' representatives, value-added-resellers, distributors and systems integrators. MRV also has operations in Europe that provide network system design, integration and distribution services that include products manufactured by third-party vendors, as well as internally developed and manufactured products. Publicly traded since 1992, MRV is listed on the NASDAQ National Market under the symbol MRVC. For more information about MRV and its products, please call (818) 773-0900 or visit our websites at http://www.mrv.com/ and http://www.luminentoic.com/.

Media Relations MRV Communications, Inc. David Rodewald (805) 494-9508 pr@mrv.com

CONTACT: David Rodewald of MRV Communications, Inc., +1-805-494-9508,
pr@mrv.com

Web site: http://www.mrv.com/
http://www.luminentoic.com/
http://www.mrv.com/product/MRV-OP-SDISFP