SH-Mobile, Renesas, Flexible Movie Player

Movie Player Video/Audio Playback Software Achieves High-Performance Video Processing on the SH-Mobile Application Processor for Mobile Phones

News Release from: Renesas Technology Europe Ltd
25/04/2008

Renesas has announced the development of a Flexible Movie Player video/audio playback software package for embedded systems using the SH-Mobile application processor for mobile phones. The software will be available from July 2008 in Japan.

Flexible Movie Player is software designed for the SH-Mobile, which incorporates full hardware acceleration supporting the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard. It more efficiently extracts the video processing performance of the SH-Mobile than the video playback middleware previously released by Renesas Technology. In particular, Flexible Movie Player can deliver high-quality video reproduction even of content requiring high-volume processing by the CPU. With earlier middleware video processing performance would have suffered when playing such content due to the priority given to audio processing.

In addition, support for playback of MP4 video files, which are widely used on mobile phones, is provided as standard, and modules are available for extending support to newer file formats in the future. This makes it possible for mobile phone handsets to provide high-quality playback of multiple types of video content. This modular structure provides flexibility in expanding functions and shortens the system development time.

In recent years the types of processing required of CPUs in mobile phone handsets in order to play video content have proliferated as screen sizes have increased, data compression rates have risen, and the need to reproduce original content has grown. Renesas Technology currently offers video playback middleware for the SH-Mobile that supports playback of MP4 files only. This middleware gives priority to the audio portion of the content during playback in order to minimize dropouts. This sometimes results in a drop in video quality when the number of frames output per time unit decreases.

To deal with this problem, Renesas Technology reevaluated the audio-first processing system used in the existing video playback middleware and decided instead on a new audio-video independent processing system when developing the Flexible Movie Player software. This ensures high-quality playback of MP4 files, with no audio dropouts and no reduction in the video frame rate.