MPEG-4 processor on a chip created
Get ready for a slew of MPEG-4 announcements this year. We'll start you off with one from yesterday: Telairity introduced a new system-on-a-chip for MPEG-4 decoding. The single-solution chip should reduce costs and provide the additional horsepower needed for decoding. According to the company, the number of computations to decode MPEG-4 is four to six greater than for MPEG-2.
If you're wondering why we expect MPEG-4 to become a big buzzword over the last few months, we'll clue you in. Current satellite feeds use MPEG-2, which isn't as efficient as MPEG-4. Compression rates are much higher for MPEG-4 and since HDTV uses so much bandwidth, the content providers need to make the switch. DirecTV and Dish have both indicated the move is coming, but details are still sketchy since this will likely require hardware upgrades.
