Mobilygen Inc., a leading provider of low-power H.264 codec ICs for mobile devices, has announced that its MG1264 chip supports real-time, high-quality H.264/AAC video capture compatible with the video iPodTM. This is the industry’s first chip enabling manufacturers to easily add H.264 video recording capabilities compatible with video-enabled iPods, as well as PCs and Macs. The MG1264 requires only 125mW total chip power enabling USB powered devices to capture and encode H.264 30fps QVGA 768kbps Baseline Profile video including 2-channel AAC high-fidelity stereo audio.
People want to control what they watch, and when they watch it. Easy conversion of personal content, and real-time DVR functionality, are essential ingredients to mass-market adoption of video in portable devices. According to a recent Jupiter Research survey, 51% of consumers would watch movies on a portable media player and 55% of them are interested in watching TV shows.
“Consumers want simple and easy personalization of their video content,” says Steve Musallam, vice president of product marketing at Mobilygen in the press release. “Our MG1264 provides superior hardware based H.264/AAC encoding quality and an inexpensive solution to building low-power devices that capture in real-time 30fps TV-quality video for new mobile products like the video iPod.” Mobilygen’s unique chip architecture is dedicated to low-power video processing. The patented EVE (Enabling Video Everywhere) architecture was used to implement the MG1264. It includes an advanced video pre-processor that greatly improves H.264 encoder efficiency, and patented low-power H.264 video coding algorithms developed specifically to maximize video quality. The MG1264 is capable of encoding H.264 up to full D1 video resolution and 2-channel AAC audio requiring only 185mW of total chip power.
The MG1264 is fully qualified and available in production volumes now. Commercial samples and evaluation boards are also available. The MG1264 is priced at less than $10 in production volumes.
Mobilygen is the leading developer of low-power H.264 compression ICs for mobile products. Based in Santa Clara, Mobilygen is a privately held fabless semiconductor company backed by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, Redpoint Ventures, Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Integral Capital Partners, and Cardinal Venture Capital. For more information, please visit http://www.mobilygen.com
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Wow, .2 Watts of power, smaller than a dime. But what is this used for? Would Apple use this chip, or some sort of digital camera to capture iPod video content?
Um…….uh…………..<thinking>……….uh………… WHOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOO YEAH!!!! Way to go!!!!!!
Now put one in a USB Thumbdrive sized plug so I can use it on my iBook.
This is what the video community has LONG been waiting for..
Andrew Hamilton
Las Vegas Videographers
Hamilton International Productions
http://www.hiproductions.com
Well, you take the video from a tuner, settop box, sat receiver…anything, and run it thru this chip in a Mac Mini on its way to your disk drive. And presto – you have your h.264 encoding done in real time as it’s sucked in. Eliminating encode time will go a long way in making that thing that Apple wants to put in our living rooms.
I’m assuming that this technology would allow, say, direct video recording from a portable digital video recorder to the iPod? There are solutions like this out there, but the advantage here is the compression- thus allowing many, many hours of video recording while using relatively little space. I think that’s the advantage, anyway…
Perhaps Apple is going to have an iPod camcorder before it has a phone?
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Makes more sense to me. If so… I’ll take one!
Would Apple use this chip?
Possibly. Or possibly some future Apple competitor with a video iPod killer. Or any other computer manufacturer. Video equipment manufacturers. The potential list of applications and users is large.
Remember that H.264 and AAC (or at least AAC by another name) are industry standards. Being a standard it has the potential to be widely adopted. Any adopters will be looking for components like this.
Now cameras and phones that take Quicktime movies can be “iPod Ready”
The cynic in me thinks that by adding the $10 chip to an iPod/Mac will add about $100 to the price.
(I really hope it doesn’t add too much $$ though.)
Well, this is going to land up in some interesting devices…
1) Obviously, mobile phones – even if a $10 chip adds $50 to the value of the phone, it doesn’t matter because the phones are heavily subsidised by the networks anyway. Wrap it all up in .3GPP and goodnight Vienna.
2) Take a CCD device (like an embedded iSight), wrap it in an iPod-connector friendly package. Wait for Apple to put chip in a 6G or 7G iPod. Instant camcorder.
3) Welcome to the high-def Webcam.
All in all, a welcome development.
And for some more worthless interesting news…
Who will have the “First Post” of 2006 at MDN?
Easy math: New Chip. Mac mini DVR. Chip + Mac = Real time video recording.
Maybe:p
this is a smaller version of the long awaited external H.264 encoder/decoder
I must be in the other 50%, I try to watch a movie on the viPod, but just wind up stopping about a few minutes in and switch to my 30″
The video iPod would be great at short instructional videos.
Like how to set your VCR, how to bait a hook for certain fish, how to properly hold a paint brush, how to change the oil in your ’98 buick.
Imagine that? Several hundred thousand instructional videos at your fingertips for whatever you need?
Did you hear that Mac friends? You have your cue now run with it before some PC person does it first.
“Welcome to the high-def Webcam.”
Uh…Apple’s iSight uses H.264, right?
So let’s see here:
.1 watt for QVGA (320×240) up to .2 watts for D1 resolution (720×480).
DV (720×480) is 4 minutes per GB.
I imagine an acceptable H264 capture would be two hours per gig.
Not bad!
I hope they got Apple to approve this press release.
They don’t want their Apple PVR contract to get Steve’d.
Meatloaf is tasty.
heres another hot tip from clown shoes, i just got off the phone with apple care , why, my 4 month old g4 ibook crashed, thank god my shit was backed up, it seems to be either the logic board or the hard drive, its on its way to cupertino as we speak, that being said macs rule, i love them, couldn’t pay me to use a p.c., but shit happens, not to angry about it, i got apple care so Fe. oh yeah what’s the point of this post, i spoke to the guy for like an hour, nice guy too, but he said that they have been getting tons, like tons off this exact problem lately and that he thinks “they boys over at redmond have released some kinda bug to mess up hard drives of OSX users running M$ OFFICE.” his words not mine.! did you get that, i’ll say it again, he said they have been getting tons off this exact crash scenario lately, and thinks there’s an osx M$ BUG out there physically crashing hard drives and logic boards ( and yes i know about the logic board ibook problems already), he thinks this is different though. do you think billy boy is scared, really scared. things that make you go Hmmmmmmmmm.
MW: OPEN. your mind to the possibility of a crash. hahahahah!
clown shoes, could you be more specific about the cause of your problem? The version of office, the specific app. Not because i want to do any sleuth work on this, it’s because i wanna know before i launch one of those apps again.
Im sure any bug they hvae in there is accidental otherwise they could be leaving themselves open to a bigtime lawsuit.
Oh great, we get Shakes the Clown.
The Mac Business Unit over at MS is fiercely pro-mac. I think they would know something about this and it would leak from a better source than some drunken clod-hopper.
sure, hammer , i came home from work open my ibook logged in and it was as if i never even had used the computer before, everything looked like it does when you first buy it, i mean the dock. all my apps icons where gone. all the folders where HUGE and on top of each other in a folder gang bang, my i tunes was gone ,empty,
safari woudlnt let my go here and kept crashing, but it would let me go to drudge report funny enuff, luckily i got everything backed up on my ipod, before i went anyfurther…….i went through the system preffs and reset everything back to how i like it then restarted and it was all fugged up again, and again, and again…..i tried the techtool cd but nothing worked apple care walked me through some stuff but nothing,worked finally, while on the phone with apple care i got a beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep and a flashing sleep light the a grey screen telling me “my shits waz crazy fucked yo” in “FREDS VOICE” JK. JK. JK., i am running 10.4 tiger i update like a crack fien,
UMMMMMM. i think its like “ms osx office student edition from 2003”, i think. i only use word and excell cuz everbody else use’s it and i have too. as well.
william dont hate shakes the clown, that was a funny movie, and if you think im trying to be like some kinda secret tip guy well then your just flat wrong, although i did post the “ipod meat” story yesterday before mdn did. so fuck you.
this really happened i dont care if you or anyone else believes me, oh and for the record. i dont really think that billy and co realesed a virus or anything like that. i think my logic board went out but the guy on the phone said that to me. as a way off joking around or something. i dont think apple is giving away state secrets on the phone to stoner clowns. thats why i said HIS WORDS NOT MINE, you jack ass.
i like weed , not booze. for the record.
MW: ILL as in your logic board william
You like weed better than alcohol, eh?
Well then I don’t think MS Excel is a powerful enough tool to calculate the amount of brain cells you are consuming with every one of your posts.
Not to mention the amount of brain cells it takes to even understand one of your posts.