Table-1 Consumer AV products market (Japan)
Notes:
- Above figures (unit-sales) were derived from JEITA (Japan electronics and information technology industries association) and CIPA (Camera & Imaging Products Association). The figures in 2006 are predicted from sales statistics of January thru October/2006.
- Prediction of 2007 is anticipated from monthly figures of 2006.
- In Japan, most mobile phones include DSC.
- A percentage of 3G mobile phones contain video telephony and its services.
- A percentage of the mobile phones are equipped with 1-seg DTV receiver.
The above table highlights the following key points:
- Portable consumer device segment (mobile phone, DSC) is a big and growing market.
- The evolution of personal portable devices is having a notable change in our life style, in particular the way we communicate.
Beside the changes in the portable market shown in table-1, video in the home is rapidly transitioning towards High Definition (HD) quality. Similarly video in portable devices is moving toward Standard Definition (SD) or VGA quality from QVGA or smaller. There is a very clear trend in consumer AV (audio-visual) world and market where many products are becoming personal mobile devices rather than desk-top and home centric devices.
H.264's advanced algorithms offer higher compression, lower communication channel bandwidth, smaller storage requirements and flexible scheme for AV networking; however, those algorithms also require more processing power to encode and decode the video content. Obviously the first requirement of any mobile device is low power consumption for longer battery life. In the following sections, we would summarize how Qpixel's H.264 compression ICs satisfy the video quality and low power requirements of portable consumer devices.
