According to recent research from In-Stat, the market for video encoding, decoding and transcoding chips is forecast to reach 1.6 billion devices/year by 2011, representing a market size of more than $8Bn.

Any time, any place, anywhere

Consumers increasingly want to access their entertainment content across multiple screens and devices, from smartphones and portable media players to second TVs, games consoles, PCs, and laptops.

Content can either be "sideloaded" into a portable device using a memory card, or streamed across a home network or the internet ("slinging").

As each of these devices and networks supports different screen resolutions, bitrates, and video formats, video needs to be transcoded, a hugely complex computational task.

By integrating video transcoding into consumer products such as home gateways, advanced set-top-boxes, PVRs and Blu-Ray/HD-DVD recorders, "sideloading" and "slinging" of content to different devices becomes straightforward.

Software-programmable silicon is needed to support the wide variety of formats, resolutions and bitrates demanded by the consumer, as well as supporting future codecs, and providing continual upgrades to improve quality and reduce bandwidth.

The HD performance challenge

Broadcast TV, DVDs, digital cameras, camcorders and cameraphones are moving from standard definition to High Definition, with up to 10x the number of pixels to be processed.

Alongside this transition to HD, next-generation video codecs like H.264/AVC and Windows Media/VC-1 are being adopted, which can offer half the bandwidth and twice the storage capacity of the legacy MPEG-4, MPEG-2 and DV codecs.

Like most broadcast compression standards, these new codecs have been developed to reduce the complexity of the decoders, at the expense of significantly higher complexity on the encode side.

These two trends have combined to create a 30-50x discontinuity in the processing power required for advanced HD video compression and transcoding, putting the task way beyond the capabilities of today's DSP and CPU architectures.