Renesas develops HD Video Middleware

Renesas Technology Europe has announced the HD Video Middleware, which will help the development of applications for the SH-Mobile application processor.

To complement the HD Video Middleware, Renesas is developing the SH-Mobile application processor supporting recording and playback of video in the 1280 x 720 pixel HD resolution for mobile phones.

With an on-chip hardware accelerator supporting full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) resolution video, it complies with the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) video compression standard.

The HD Video Middleware is designed for use with SH-Mobile products, enabling recording and playback of video in the MP4 format, which is widely used for video files on existing mobile phones, with the H.264 standard.

The middleware also supports MPEG-2 TS (Transport Stream), a multiplexed HD video format that is rapidly gaining adoption in the digital home electronics field.

This will simplify the process of turning video captured with the camera of a mobile phone into HD video files that can be displayed on digital home electronics products.

HD Video Middleware was developed in collaboration with the systems development laboratory at Hitachi.

The hardware accelerator, with full HD support, draws on the technical expertise accumulated by Renesas Technology to process H.264 data using the fewest possible resources.

It enables display of full HD video at 30 frames per second (fps) with low power consumption.

HD Video Middleware is software that provides control of the hardware accelerator.

It can be combined with other Renesas Technology middleware supporting high-quality audio compression standards, such as AAC-LC (low complexity advanced audio coding) and Dolby Digital (Dolby Digital middleware is currently under development), to implement recording and playback of long video clips with excellent picture and sound quality.

HD Video Middleware employs the zero-copy technique and asynchronous high-speed transfer technique to move data between its function modules.

These techniques make it possible to achieve a bit rate of 9Mbps and enables handling of the large data sizes required for high-definition video.

Also supported is B-frame, as defined in the H.264 standard.

B-frame makes it possible to reduce the bit rate while maintaining picture quality, allowing smaller file sizes and recording of longer video clips.

As well as the MP4 format, HD Video Middleware supports the MPEG2-TS multiplexed format.

This facilitates playback on digital home electronics products of HD video content captured and recorded using a mobile phone.

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