DM642

DSP Research has over ten years of experience designing advanced DSP boards with Texas Instruments processors. The latest media processor from TI, the DM642, is quickly becoming the preferred choice for advanced video processing, and DSP Research is leading the way with its line of H.264 Video Compression boards.

H.264 Codec

A key component in the Video Compression systems from DSP Research is the very efficient and compact H.264 codec which runs on the DM642. This codec has been developed over a period of two years by DSP Research's parent company W&W Communications. This codec implementation is first to market and is also available for licensing for your own hardware. Please see http://www.wwcoms.com for more details.

The H.264 / MPEG4 AVC Standard

H.264 is the most advanced video coding standard available today. It uses many new coding techniques not available in MPEG2, MPEG4 and H.263. This new standard is taking the industry by storm and was jointly developed by the ISO MPEG and ITU standardization bodies. This chart shows the evolution of video coding standards.

For those of you who want to learn more about video compression and the H.264 standard, the following site is an excellent place to start:

H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Introduction

For you who are already familiar with video compression standards and want to know more about the H.264 standard, the following publication (19 pages) is an excellent source:

H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Overview (PDF) (2.986KB)

A draft of the whole H.264 Standard (264 pages) from the 'ITU-T 8^th meeting: Geneva, Switzerland, May 23-27 2003', is also downloadable below:

The whole H.264 Standard (draft from May 23-27 2003) (PDF) (1,334KB)

H.264 Performance

The new H.264 video compression standard is the first to be ratified by both the ISO/IEC and ITU-T. It raises the bar considerably compared to MPEG4-ASP and yields better picture quality while significantly lowering the bit rate. This allows lower overall system cost, reduced infrastructure requirements and enables many new video applications. H.264 is considered the greatest achievement in video compression in the past 10 years and is already finding its way into many mainstream video applications.

Below follow some practical comparisons between different coding technologies for 90 min of DVD quality video:

H.264 Patent Licensing Fees

One more great aspect of H.264 is the licensing fee structure by the patent holders of technology that went into the standard. MPEG4 was significantly hampered by complicated and excessive licensing fees demanded by its patent holder. For H.264 the industry has learned from its mistakes with MPEG-4 and created a very simple and low cost licensing structure. There are two H.264 patent licensing organizations: MPEG-LA and Via Licensing. Both have similar licensing terms. Here are some key points from the MPEG-LA patent licensing organization:

	Until Jan 2005 there are no licensing fees at all
	After that, there are still no licensing fees for the first 100,000 units shipped
	Above 100,000 units, licensing fees vary between $0.10 and $0.20 per unit