Santa Clara, Calif.—W&W Communications Inc. is sampling the WW20K H.264 HD codec chipset for live broadcast applications.
The chipset consists of the WW20000BA single chip encoder and the WW20001BA single chip decoder. The low encode-decode tandem delay and ability to encode 1080 video at high quality and relatively low bit rates makes the WW20K chipset suitable for live HD video broadcast applications, such as sports and news events.
"The broadcast industry is in the midst of converting to the HD format. However, the high bit rates of broadcast quality HD video material poses a challenge to real-time news and event coverage in high-definition," said Kishan Jainandunsing, Vice President Marketing at W&W Communications, in a statement. "Our WW20K chipset provides the broadcast industry with a practical and robust solution to take down this last barrier towards HD video broadcasting."
The H.264 standard produces superior results compared to the older MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video compression standards. However, the significantly higher computational complexity of H.264 poses a major challenge in terms of power and footprint.
The WW20K chipset overcomes these challenges by running at 110-MHz only, in single chip implementations of the encoder and decoder. The WW20000BA encoder compresses 1080i/p HD video at 2x lower bit rates and 15% better PSNR than MPEG-2 HD encoders. The WW20001BA decoder decompresses the encoder's bit stream into 1080i/p or 720p HD video.
A development kit is available with HD-SDI and HDMI inputs and outputs, PCI bus and 10/100Base-T Ethernet interfaces.
Availability: Mass production scheduled for April 2007.
Product brochure: click here
WW20K product page: click here.
W&W Communications Inc., 1.408.481.0264, www.wwcoms.com.
