Digital Home Appliances

In the digital home appliances market, similar to the portable devices market, the optimum balance of high video quality, low bit rate and storage needs, and low cost must be achieved. In these applications, the lower bit rate of Main Profile H.264 encoding offers higher efficiency streaming and storage capabilities, which in turn translate into more applications for the consumer and more monthly revenue for service providers and operators. The following are a few examples of some of applications in the Digital Home Appliance market enabled by Qpixel’s high quality encoding products.

 

Qpixel Enables Multiple New Functions in IP Set-top Box

In a typical digital home appliance application, the QL200 products can be added to an existing IP set top box design, enabling or enhancing it with new features. A few functions the QL200 products enable with the H.264 Main Profile encoding include:

• Disk doubling capacity:  The benefits of the highly efficient H.264 compression directly result in increased storage capacity. The QL200 products enable 50% more storage capacity than MPEG-2 in a PVR/DVR set top box. This means users who want to store broadcast content for its PVR/DVR functionality to play back later (also known as time-shifting), can effectively store twice as much content as they would be able to with normal MPEG-2 broadcast content.  This essentially means that the addition of the Qpixel H.264 encoder adds system-level transcoding functionality to the STB. 

• Place-shifting or location-free functionality: The QL200 codecs, benefiting from the low throughput requirements of Main Profile H.264 compression, allow the encoded video content to be easily moved to external portable or storage devices, to be viewed anytime and anyplace. With the flexibility of different bitstream formats supported by the QL200 family of products, the video can be either locally stored, or transmitted to many different types of devices for portable viewing, such as Apple iPods, Sony PSPs, Flash cards, or any other digital media player capable of decoding H.264 content.

• Encoding into H.264 from any external video source: The QL200-based designs can support standard analog inputs such as through an S-video or composite video input sources. After being digitized, the QL200 codec would encode the video stream into H.264 Main Profile for subsequent efficient storage or transmission in the set top box. The benefit the QL200 codec brings is the ability to take any external standard video source such as from a DVD player, external camera, or even a PC and automatically increase the amount of video that can be stored, or compress it so that it this video can be place-shifted easily. The flexibility this feature offers gives the user many options for obtaining video content to be easily encoded into H.264 format.

 

Digital Home Appliance – IP Set-top box with Videoconferencing

In videoconferencing over IP or other video streaming applications, the QL200 products enable efficient use of precious upstream bandwidth.  This feature opens up service provider options for supporting more video streams, or other value added services, generating additional revenue or enhancing the consumer experience.

In the following application, the Qpixel QL200 product is used as an H.264 encoder within a USB compression camera, allowing an existing IP set top box to be automatically videoconferencing-enabled by simply adding this USB device. The QL200 effectively encodes the video stream from the incoming source, into H.264 format so that it can be transmitted efficiently through the set top box. With the H.264 Main Profile standard’s highly efficient use of precious bandwidth, an extremely smooth two-way videoconferencing user experience can be achieved. In many homes where the upstream bandwidth may be somewhat limited compared to the downstream bandwidth, this videoconferencing system would still be able to maintain a high quality video experience.

In new designs, the QL200 codec can be integrated into the set top box design, either as a daughter card option or directly onto the main board. The same benefits of H.264 in videoconferencing would be realized by plugging a simple, low-cost USB camera into the box.