Jari Ketola
13 Jan 2003 15:06
Sand Video Inc. demonstrated a high-definition (1,920 x 1,080i), real-time H.264 decoder implemented on two Xilinx Inc. field-programmable gate arrays at the Consumer Electronics Show last week. The company promised to deliver commercial samples of a silicon implementation in Q4 of 2003.
H.264 is one of the competing encoding standards for the upcoming HD-DVD standard. DVD-Forum decided to go with the old red-laser technology with HD-DVD, which means that in order to provide high-definition picture, new codec has to be used in place of the current MPEG2. Red-laser technology severely limits the capacity of the storage medium and hence MPEG2 is out of question at higher resolutions.
Sand Video will be delivering both an H.264 encoder, and an H.264 encoder/decoder chip. The chips also decode MPEG2 video for full backwards compatibility. The company will also be providing a "companion chip", which will work with an existing MPEG-2 decoder IC. With the companion chip DVD-player manufacturers can easily add support for HD-DVD, should DVD-Forum go with H.264 for HD-DVD9.
Read (much) more on the topic at EE Times