Thursday, May 20, 2010

WebM Project

As announced, Google opened the VP8 codec to the open source community as the WebM Project.

WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska container. The full source code is freely donwloadable.

Just yesterday the x264 community released his personal technical opinion on the VP8 codec in this blog post.

Friday, May 14, 2010

26% of web video is H.264

Over one quarter of the videos on the Internet are now available in H.264/AVC format, according to the latest analysis from MeFeedia: 26% compared with just 10% in January. MeFeedia’s video index includes over 30,000 sources, including Hulu, CBS, ABC, YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, MTV, and CNN.

Notably, most sites that support HTML5 automatically detect iPad users and switch to a compatible format, many recent news stories are available in H.264 while most older news content has yet to be re-encoded, and there is very little HTML5 supported episodic content available from major TV networks.

Inside Apple's A4

An analysis by UBM TechInsights shows the Apple A4 processor in the iPad is a single-core ARM Cortex A8 made by Samsung.

Source: Embedded.com



Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Radvision selects Freescale for HD Videoconference

Freescale Semiconductor’s high-performance MSC8144 multicore digital signal processor (DSP) has been selected by Radvision for use in its latest high-definition SCOPIA Elite 5000 Unified Communications Video Infrastructure Multiparty Conferencing Unit.

SCOPIA Elite is the industry’s first standards based MCU to natively support advanced H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) technology. RADVISION’s SVC technology provides a high quality experience over unmanaged networks such as the public Internet, particularly benefitting desktop video conferencing users on the road or teleworkers from their home offices. This approach provides the benefits of high error resiliency while maintaining full interoperability and high quality with conferencing and telepresence systems not currently using SVC.

Tuned for a myriad of wireline and wireless applications, Freescale’s MSC8144 DSP is the workhorse behind SCOPIA Elite high-definition video compression processing, enabling it with high channel density, energy efficiency and form factor advantages. The MSC8144 combines four high-performance 1 GHz DSP cores based on SC3400 StarCore™ technology with 10 MB internal memory and high-speed interconnects such as Serial RapidIO® and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.

Sources: Businesswire, Radvision.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

HEVC and HTTP streaming

Many news from the 92nd MPEG meeting held in Dresden, Germany from the 19th to the 23rd of April 2010.

The Joint Call for Proposals on Video Compression Technology, which was issued jointly by MPEG and ITU-T VCEG in January 2010, had a very successful outcome. 27 complete proposal submissions were received, and the associated video material was evaluated in extensive subjective tests. The JCT-VC has begun identification and integration of proposed design elements toward development of a new video coding design to be known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC).

Moreover, MPEG has decided to launch a separate and immediate standardization effort specifically addressing the need of HTTP based streaming or progressive download of MPEG media and a Call for Proposals, available here, was issued.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

The future will be (auto)captioned

YouTube has turned on the ability to add full closed captions to videos. This will not only allow videos to appeal more directly to foreign audiences, but will give YouTube excellent data for searching videos and targeting ads to them.
Quoting the official YouTube blog:
Making video easily accessible is something we're working hard to address at YouTube. One of the first steps we took was the development of a caption feature in 2008. In November of last year we released auto-captioning for a small, select group of partners. Auto-captioning combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms found in Google's Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by a viewer. The video owner can also download the auto-generated captions, improve them, and upload the new version. Viewers can even choose an option to translate those captions into any one of 50 different languages -- all in just a couple of clicks.