msmobiles.com - Cellular News - Alphamosaic Announces H.264 On Production Silicon

Alphamosaic Announces H.264 On Production Silicon
May 28, 2004;
H.264 - better than MPEG-4!

The next generation video encoding standard has now been implemented on the popular VC01 from Alphamosaic, the industry leader in multimedia processors for mobile phones.

Ideal for digital handheld TV applications, the new H.264 codec offers superior picture quality with greater data compression than the current mobile video standard known as MPEG-4. Unlike conventional processors, which struggle with the greatly increased computation needed to decode H.264 video, the VideoCore family from Alphamosaic features a vector processing engine which can handle large amounts of data in a single instruction cycle. This architecture maps perfectly onto complex algorithms such as H.264, enabling video to be encoded and decoded with minimum power consumption and hence maximum battery life.

Alphamosaic provides audio as well as video codecs for its VideoCore family of ICs. The result is a complete solution that removes the problems of audio-visual synchronisation and replaces separate ICs such as MIDI synthesisers. With H.264 Alphamosaic will be shipping the advanced aacPlus audio codec which provides significantly better data compression than the aac codec used in MPEG-4.

Transmission of H.264 is already taking place for mobile TV trials by Tokyo FM in Japan with full participation by Alphamosaic and partner Vitec (20 June 2003). These trials have shown the suitability of the VideoCore family for mobile TV whether the transmission standard be ISDBT, DMB or the new DVB-H system being trialled in Europe and North America. The use of VC01 in forthcoming commercial phones for mobile Video on Demand in Asia is another ground-breaking application for VideoCore technology and is further evidence of Alphamosaic’s industry leading position in mobile multimedia.

For more information, please visit www.alphamosaic.com

Back to other news index