CPU制造工艺(5)

Licensing a Codec to Accelerate Development

For Oregan Networks, one of the leading middleware providers for networked media applications, licensing athird party MPEG-2 codec as a near-term solution made perfect sense. “When you are cutting ground on aproduct with so many variables, you don’t want codec development to be one of them,” says Reed Hinkel, VPof Business Development at Oregan Networks. “Performance was simply a must-have, but we wanted ourengineers to be focused on functionality, not optimization.” Oregan architects were working long hours on anumber of development projects, creating tools and products to enable their customers to meet compliancewith the Intel®Networked Media Product Requirements (Intel®NMPR) specifications. Designing an MPEG-2codec from the ground up did not represent an efficient use of their time. From the perspective of OreganNetworks, the attention that Ligos devoted to the performance of its GoMotion MPEG-2 codec provided theability to support a greater number of content streams to more devices. The interoperability framework beingestablished by Intel and other companies as a part of Intel NMPR creates an environment within whichconsumers can enjoy a positive entertainment experience and easy interconnection of devices. The

middleware solutions developed by Oregan Networks help device manufacturers deliver products that complywith Intel NMPR guidelines. By applying validation tests and utilizing an extensive collection of developmenttools, companies poised to enter the digital home market can shorten their time to market and create productswith maximum interoperability. This framework makes it possible to freely exchange and share digital mediacontent in a variety of formats and across a range of devices.

Realizing the Vision

It was a number of years from the time the firsttelevision camera and receiver sent a grainy image toa roomful of viewers to the time that people aroundthe country could turn on the set in their living roomand choose from a variety of broadcasts. Similarly, thetools and technologies that make it possible toefficiently deliver digital media to a wide range ofdevices in the home are still evolving. Intel and anumber of supporting companies, by championing theIntel NMPR guidelines, provide a framework withinwhich the building blocks for delivering digital contentcan be created and deployed. Companies such asLigos, SeaChange and Oregan Networks make thevision a reality, by offering the means to efficientlytransfer digital media content to devices that aredesigned to present the content for an optimalaudience experience. The talents of the developmentcommunity and the supporting efforts by Intel andother companies combine to bring us closer to a timewhen digital media entertainment can be enjoyed onany conceivable device—from a smart phone to anotebook computer to an elaborate homeentertainment system.

As the broadcasting community becomes more opento the possibilities of software-based encodersrunning on standard hardware, sometimes it onlytakes a simple demonstration to highlight theadvantages of this approach. At the NationalAssociation of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in2004, Ligos presented a demo at their booth thatcaught the eye of visitors. The demo involved bothoutputting the stream as a broadcast format stream(using a DVB-ASI interface) while taking the samestream encoded at a lower bit rate and outputting itover Ethernet as a UDP multicast to a totally separatestation on the other side of the booth.

“Most NAB visitors thought that was really cool,” RobertSaint John noted. “They can see all sorts of practicalapplications of that technique, whether it is doing asimulcast over two different networks or having theflexibility to both encode and broadcast. Or, they canencode and contribute to a broadcast system throughone output and create a low bit rate or alternative formatproxy for an archive server that could be browsed oraccessed at a later time. That kind of functionality wouldbe very expensive to reproduce in DSP-based systems.It would require multiple pieces of equipment. But, it’s asnap for MediaRig.”

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