NTT Electronics Promotes Enhanced Efficiency in Video Compression
July 3, 2008
excerpt from AEI (ASIA ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY) July 2008 - Published by Dempa Publications, Inc.
Michael Thuresson
Product Planning Manager, Digital Video BG NTT Electronics Corp.
The rise of high-definition (HD) broadcasting fosters increasing demand for high quality video communications. To take advantage of HD features, broadcasters of video images need video compression to maintain fine quality and low latency.
“The role of video compression is important in increasing video communications… as worldwide demand for full HDTVs continues to grow,” said Michael Thuresson, Product Planning Manager, Digital Video Business Group, NTT Electronics Corp. Thuresson led a Technology Session on NGN Enablers June 4 at the NGN Forum in Taipei.
The global shift from standard to high-definition images, and the emergence of broadband services has spurred the use of video communications. Video transmissions require compression technology because the original video data is 1.5Gbps. NTT Electronics selected the AVC/H.264 specification for compression technology because it has greater compression efficiency than MPEG-2. Thuresson said the AVC/H.264 format delivers 36dB picture quality at 4Mbps, while MPEG-2 transmits the same image quality at 9.5Mbps. “In the coding performance comparison, AVC/H.264 compression efficiency is more than double that of MPEG-2,” Thuresson said.
Although the AVC/H.264 has greater compression efficiency than MPEG-2, the necessary processing power is 10 to 100 times that of MPEG-2. Even with the latest Core 2 Duo processors, realtime AVC/H.264 encoding is difficult. One solution is transcoding from MPEG-2 to AVC/H.264 formats. This helps maintains the best possible quality in videos from the content creation stage onward, through content production and delivery to the home.
NTT Electronics offers codec LSIs featuring excellent video quality and super-low latency. Devices like these have strong potential in non-broadcast fields that also are shifting rapidly to HD formats. These include digital home electronics, personal computers with audiovideo functions, surveillance systems, camcorders and DVD players.
NTT Electronics’ portfolio includes the SARA professional encoder and decoder LSIs for AVC/H.264, the MACH low-latency encoder LSI for MPEG-2, the Matiz MPEG-2-to-H.264/AVC transcoder LSI, the SuperENC V MPEG-2 codec LSI, the MPEG-2-compatible LibraENC encoder LSI featuring low latency, and the PINEA AVC/H.264 LSI with a PCI-Express interface.