SH-Mobile sharpens video image
13 May 2008
Video/audio playback software ups the ante on video processing for mobile phones.
Sound and video often have to compete for processing power in today’s mobile phones as priority is given to the audio portion of the content during playback, to minimise dropouts. This can be a nuisance when the image of George Clooney plays second fiddle to the soundtrack. Now, Renesas has developed Flexible Movie Player video/audio playback software for its SH-Mobile (SuperH Mobile application processor) for mobile phone systems. SH-Mobile connects to the baseband processor and is dedicated to multimedia applications using video and audio.
The software has hardware acceleration, supporting the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC 2 video compression standard. Developed by the ITU-T (International Telecommunication Union) and the ISO and IE, the compression standard has been adopted for terrestrial digital broadcasts to mobile devices in Japan and for digital broadcasts overseas.
It extracts the video processing performance more efficiently than earlier playback middlware from the company and can deliver the high-quality video reproduction, even of content which requires high-volume processing by the CPU, claims the company. Previously, video processing suffered form the priority given to audio. By using an audio-video independent processing system, the full performance of the hardware acceleration and DSP can be extracted. The company gives the example of video processing VGA-size content recorded at 30frame/sec which can be boosted by 30 per cent, it claims, with no drop in performance, even with higher quality video, which has placed a processing load on the CPU previously.
There is support for playback of MP4 video files, used on mobile phones, as standard and modules are available for extending support to future file formats for multiple types of video content to be accessible to mobile phone handsets. It will also be possible to provide new codec support to implement higher compress and decompression levels using this modular software. According to the company, this software halves the time to develop supporting software and develop a new module.
The software will be available in Japan from July. It can be used with customer-developed middleware as well as that from Renesas Technology’s file operation middleware and codec middleware.
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