HD Video Middleware simplifies development of recording and playback applications for mobile devices

To complement the HD Video Middleware, Renesas Technology is developing the SH-Mobile application processor for mobile phones. With an on-chip hardware accelerator supporting Full HD (1920 × 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 these SH-Mobile products, enabling recording and playback of video up to HD resolution 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 Systems Development Laboratory, Hitachi, Ltd.

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 (such as on-chip memory capacity and circuit scale). It enables display of Full HD video at 30 frames per second (fps) with low power consumption. HD Video Middleware is software that provides efficient control of the hardware accelerator. In addition, 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 currently under development), to implement recording and playback of long video clips with excellent picture and sound quality.

In addition, HD Video Middleware employs zero-copy technique and asynchronous high-speed transfer technique to move data between its function modules. These make it possible to achieve a bitrate of 9 megabits per second (Mbps), which is 4.5 times as fast as the previous maximum bitrate in the mobile phone field of 2 Mbps, 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 that is widely used on mobile phones and PCs, 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.