Jeremiah Golston
Chief Technical Officer, TI Streaming Media

Let’s pick up our discussion on HD where we left off several weeks ago. In these blog posts, we talked a lot about the digital video revolution that is transforming home entertainment and information systems. What we haven’t talked much about are the complex issues involving content interchange that are inherent in such a revolution.

HDTV is now securely placed at the upper end of home video, and video content suppliers are migrating to advanced codec algorithms such as H.264/MPEG-4 in order to supply more programming with the same bandwidth and disk space. But the need continues for support of legacy codecs (think MPEG-2). Also, a growing number of networked devices are being produced that can playback video both in and away from the home. Featuring a wide variety of formats and bandwidth capabilities, these equipments need to be able to share content, including HD video, so that the connected home doesn’t become a virtual Tower of Babel.

These factors all point to the need for transcoding: converting codec formats, resolutions, frame rates and bitrates to allow an original audio-video content source to be played back on any number of different gadgets with different capabilities. Though transcoding has long been familiar in network infrastructure equipment, its importance is only beginning to be felt in consumer devices.

To provide HD transcoding capabilities in cost-sensitive mass market video appliances, system developers will have to rethink their designs. Greater signal processing performance, system memory and I/O will all be necessary, as well as programming flexibility in order to support various codec requirements with the same hardware design. The processor used will have to provide a platform with high video performance that scales up to HD data rates, plus the right balance of on-chip memory and peripherals for affordable video design.

In the next few blogs, I want to take a deeper look at why transcoding is a vital piece of the HD puzzle. Hopefully, I won’t babble on.