TI implements H.265 on KeyStone multicore DSPs

USA: Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) announced the availability of a pre-production codec based on the industry's newest video encoding standard, H.265. This codec is optimized for TI's TMS320C6678 KeyStone-based multicore digital signal processor (DSP).

The H.265 standard has been designed to take advantage of parallel processing, making the C6678 multicore DSP an ideal platform for H.265 implementation via its eight 1.25 GHz DSP cores capable of delivering 320 GMACs and 160 GFLOPs of combined fixed- and floating-point performance.

TI's software-based implementation of the H.265 standard offers customers plenty of room to add differentiation in the codec and other pre- and post-processing algorithms. In addition, TI's design provides flexibility and scalability in developing real-time video infrastructure equipment such as multimedia gateways, IMS media servers, video conferencing servers and video broadcast equipment.

Customers can harness a pool of C6678 multicore DSPs to achieve flexibility in creating products that can scale across a number of dimensions such as video resolution, bit rates and quality. With a fully programmable approach, customers can amortize their platform investment across their entire product portfolio as well as keep up with the standard as it evolves and gains widespread acceptance.

H.265 is an attractive video encoding standard for customers needing to relay more high-definition video as it uses up to 50 percent less bandwidth, or two times compression, over the current H.264 standard while providing the same video quality. Because H.265 uses less bandwidth than existing standards, customers can utilize the existing infrastructure to deliver more video, which will reduce network operating costs for video delivery, making HD and ultra-HD streaming a reality.

The performance of the C6678 coupled with TI's tools, software and support help ease and accelerate video infrastructure development. For example, by simply plugging in a PCIe-based commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) card in a Linux desktop, customers can get to their development rapidly by using a video-based multicore software development kit (MCSDK-video) from TI.

To further ease development, TI's C6678 multimedia solution includes a comprehensive portfolio of video codecs, including the H.265 codec, which will be accessible through TI's website. TI's full portfolio of video codecs also includes the H.264, H.263, MPEG4, MPEG2, JPEG, JPEG2000, AVC Intra, VC1, Soren Spark encoders and decoders.