W&W Communications's Enables Digital Meetings

Casual day at work may be coming to an end with the advent of video conferencing. However, the benefits of being able to see demonstrations and participate in meetings remotely far outweigh the disadvantages Moving toward that inevitable future, W&W Communications, Inc. let us know about its WW10K H.264 HD codec chipset for high-definition video conferencing and telepresence applications. The chipset consists of the WW10000BA single chip encoder and the WW10001BA single chip decoder. The low encode-decode tandem delay and ability to encode and decode 1080p and 720p video at low bit rates makes the WW10K chipset suitable for high-definition video conferencing and telepresence applications. 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 WW10K chipset overcomes these challenges by running at 110MHz only, in single chip implementations of the encoder and decoder. The WW10000BA encoder compresses 1080p or 720p HD video at 2x lower bit rates and 15% better PSNR than MPEG-2 HD encoders. The WW10001BA decompresses the encoder’s bit stream into 1080i/p or 720p HD video. The chipset has an encode-decode tandem delay of less than 35ms or about 1 frame at 30 frames/second. It can handle up to four video inputs simultaneously at different bit rates and resolutions, up to 1920x1088. This makes it possible to design systems that dedicate one camera per participant or group of participants and one display per participant or group of participants. The WW10000BA encoder integrates an advanced context-adaptive noise reduction filter that reduces noise in the source video and improves the encoder’s compression efficiency depending on the video content. The WW10K H.264 HD codec chipset is currently sampling and will be available in mass production from April 2007 onwards. A development kit is available with HDMI, component, Y/C and composite video inputs and outputs, PCI and 10/100Base-T Ethernet interfaces. Contact W&W Communications, Inc. for pricing and sample availability. And dress nicely when you go to work.