Russ Curry, Ministry of New Media
Who needs another CODEC? Well, anyone who needs great quality video from a low power processor – just ask Nintendo, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Fisher-Price etc. etc.
They’re all using Mobiclip from a French company called Actimagine – its headquarters are in Paris but it already has offices in San Diego, Tokyo and Singapore.
The company was created in 2003 by 5 exiles from the Video Games world. They were obsessed by the problem of getting bigger, better, faster but without waiting for Intel to develop a tiny, cheap 4 Giga chip so they turned the problem on its head and figured out how to get the best performance out of the existing technology!
By cunning use of algorithms, they eliminated many of the cumbersome processes involved in de-coding and ended up with a codec which produces quality on a par with H.264 from a processor using 4 times less power.
The implication for battery life in hand-held devices is spectacular: on a Nokia N73 mobile phone for example, Mobiclip can play around seven hours of high-quality video, compared with just one and a half hours using MPEG4.
Any video source file can be converted into Mobiclip format – AVI, ASF, DivX, MPEG, REAL, VOB, WMV and it’s compatible with most operating systems including Palm OS, Brew, Embedded Linux, Symbian and Microsoft.
The technology is sold under license and is suitable for any operator controlling both transmission & reception. Initially the appeal was most obvious to video games & mobile phone manufacturers, but now the solution can be applied to system integrators in the Digital Signage / DOOH market.
The company is just beginning to turn attention to this sector, and we know of one operator, specialised in wireless delivery, who is taking a really close look at it.
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