Fujitsu Launches Full HD H.264 Transcoder LSI

Fujitsu Microelectronics Asia Pte Ltd announced the release of a new transcoder chip that can compress full HD (1920 x 1080) MPEG-2 video data to H.264 data. The new chip, MB86H52, is capable of compressing MPEG-2 video to less than half the data size while maintaining the same video quality. With such high compression, the new chip is ideal for use in recording equipment such as hard drives, etc., where recording time can be increased by more than 250%. It also allows transmission of full HD video over narrow bandwidths. With the predicted increase in home network appliances, there are also many opportunities to embed this transcoder into equipment where the video data size needs to be reduced.

MB86H52's superior properties are the result of a proprietary algorithm developed by Fujitsu Laboratories that automatically applies less compression to areas in the image where compression artefacts are most noticeable to human vision, such as human faces or slow-moving objects, and greater compression to other areas. Thus, high image quality for the critical zones is maximized. This technology allows the same video quality to be maintained when transcoding from MPEG-2 to H.264. For digital terrestrial and digital satellite broadcasts, data is compressed into MPEG-2 format providing high-resolution video. However, if this video is then recorded to hard drive, the file size is very large and the recording time limited. As such, Fujitsu developed this MB86H52 transcoder that converts MPEG-2 video to H.264, which has higher compression.