W&W Communications Introduces Low-latency H.264 Architecture
"W&W Communications announced today its ultra high-performance, high channel-density, low-latency and low-power Taos architecture for the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Part 10) video-coding standard. The Taos architecture is specifically optimized for video surveillance, two-way video communications and wireless video network applications, where very high channel densities, high performance, low latency and power efficiency are critical requirements.
Taos shatters through the H.264 performance barrier by being the first to enable encoding of 1920x1088 resolution video at full 60 frames per second in single chip implementations. It is also the first to smash through the channel-density barrier for H.264 with 8 simultaneous encode channels in D1 resolution at full 30 frames per second. In addition to providing superior performance and image quality it is the first to achieve near-zero end-to-end encode-decode latency, a significant ability for the rapidly growing latency-sensitive focused markets.
Taos has end-to-end encode-decode latency of less than 2ms. This unprecedented "zero" latency is crucial for video conferencing, telepresence and video telephony applications, wireless video distribution networks, where channel flipping, navigation and gaming requires instant feedback and for automated video surveillance systems where a facility needs to be secured immediately upon intruder detection.
Taos delivers the same video quality at roughly half the bit rates of MPEG-2. Other features include a flexible encoder toolset with in-loop de-blocking filter, single-pass bit rate control, content-adaptive noise filtering, programmable cost functions for motion vector and prediction mode coding, efficient search algorithms, large search area, 1/2 and 1/4 pixel motion estimation interpolation and error resiliency and concealment. Next to Baseline Profile, Taos ads support for Main and High
The first products based on the Taos architecture are scheduled for sampling in Q3-Q4 2007."
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