Japan Mobile Video Evolution
“Always in motion, the future is,” says Master Yoda – and your faithful Jedi knights at WWJ just got a lesson on what’s coming out for mobile phones here this summer. Conventional H.264 video compression requires a large volume of arithmetic operations, and additional components such as H.264-dedicated LSI application processors (essentially a high-speed digital signal processing chip). However, when a H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec meets a super algorithm that boosts on-chip processing, the result is super-clear video with less demand on battery power. “Algorithm Specialist” Techno Mathematical Co., Ltd., has just released its Digital Media New Algorithm (DMNA) and today’s program takes a look at the results.
The good news is that the super high-quality images Techno Mathematical produces will play a key role on FOMA 900i second-series and other phones later this year. If that sounds too promising, remember this company is building on firm foundations. TMC was launched last year on KDDI with Sanyo and Casio handsets and, actually, the move into FOMA comes on top of the fact that the MPEG-4 codec built on Techno Mathematical’s standard DMNA, completed in June 2003, is already installed in more than 2 million mobile phones worldwide.
While the pictures in our program speak for themselves, it is apparent that DMNA is really lightening the load for celly processors. Techno Mathematical claims its H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec can produce QCIF (176 x 144 pixels) video content at 15-40 frames per second using a 32-bit, approximately 150-MHz CPU (and a 16-bit bus with 8-MHz of memory). If you’re not a techie, know that these specs are easy for many current-generation phone architectures to reach – meaning much better mobile video without massive commercialization costs.
As mobile CPU clock speeds and memory capacities further increase, the company claims that larger video images – QVGA (320 x 240 pixels) or VGA (640 x 480 pixels) – can be supported by the decoder at even faster (around 30 frames per second) frame rates.
Techno Mathematical say they are currently developing more complex software for encoding H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard video; this software is due for completion around April.
The picture just got a whole lot clearer, we think!
— The Editors