Envivio Inc., the leading technology provider of IP video convergence encoding solutions from mobile to HD, today announced that the performance of its award-winning 4Caster M2 mobile TV encoder is to be enhanced significantly with the addition of Extreme Compression. As the global market-leading encoding platform for Mobile TV, the 25 percent increase in performance made possible using Extreme Compression on the 4Caster M2 will have a profound impact on the quality of mobile broadcast and 3G mobile streaming services around the world. Operators with both new and existing H.264 based Mobile TV deployments which use the 4Caster M2 will be able to provide subscribers with a dramatically enriched quality of experience.
Envivio's Extreme Compression supports numerous advanced features for H.264 Baseline profile encoding. New spatio-temporal adaptive rate control and an enhanced rate distortion optimization algorithm deliver significant performance improvements at the low bit rates used for Mobile TV. A new text and edge detection feature automatically applies compression specific to the text and graphics to make them more legible on smaller screens. Current testing indicates that Extreme Compression will provide additional performance improvements of up to 25% on the 4Caster M2 Mobile TV encoder at the bit rates typically used to deliver DVB-H and 3G or 3.5G mobile streaming services. This will allow Mobile TV operators to provide efficient delivery of high quality, full motion video playback which is supported by the latest mobile devices. Operators can also take advantage of the more efficient use of their available bandwidth to increase the number of live channels on mobile broadcast networks.
"Our in-house codec development team has worked incredibly hard to improve upon the already outstanding performance of the M2 encoder and we are very excited about the results," said Eric Rosier, Vice President of Engineering at Envivio. "By liaising closely with the world's mobile handset vendors and the network operators we have as customers, Envivio has been able to develop an even more efficient mobile TV compression implementation that delivers a truly stunning end user experience on mobile devices that have been designed specifically for multimedia playback."
Envivio's ultra-flexible compression architecture will allow current users of the 4Caster M2 encoder to add the new Extreme Compression capability simply by loading new software code. New software code can be uploaded to 4Caster M2 encoders individually using the built-in web server management interface, or in groups using Envivio's 4Manager NMS, allowing performance to be improved significantly while minimizing the impact on operational services. Extreme Compression will be available on the next software release of the 4Caster M2 encoder and on a future release of the 4Caster C4 encoder's Mobile TV configurations.
