Streaming video has almost killed it, but many of us may still remember DVDs. If you have ever played a DVD on a laptop, it was likely made possible by a solution created by Margi Systems , a US company founded by Shrinath and Shrikant Acharya. Margi created the first widely available PCMCIA card that enabled full DVD playback on laptops.
PCMCIA, or Personal Computer Memory Card International Association, is a standard for peripheral cards used in laptops. With Margi’s card, suddenly, users could connect this hardware, plug in a DVD, and enjoy movies right on their laptops—a transformative experience in the 1990s. “We owned pretty much the whole market globally in this,” Shrinath tells us.
DVDs come with an encryption layer, on top of the MPEG2 video format, to protect the intellectual property of movie studios by preventing unauthorised copying of the content on a disc. Margi’s solution was critical to decrypt the layer, and get to the video and play it. Margi also did the playback software that allowed you to go forward, backward, skip a segment, look at subtitles.
Shrinath says the solution was licensed by almost all the laptop makers globally. And the business was very profitable. At some point, Shrikant realised that a similar DVD solution could be created for cars, and started talking to semiconductor company STMicro to develop one.
And soon they found interest among automotive systems makers like Bosch and Siemens VDO (later sold to Continental) in Germany, a.