WonderMedia promises cordless entertainment

It never ceases to amaze me how much WonderMedia fits into a chip. SoC designs features video, audio, storage, memory etc, and the WonderMedia PRIZM WM8950 SoC platform, it has just been announced, will support the upcoming Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Miracast™ standard. Miracast was developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance®. It's got nothing, pretty much, to do with networking; it's all about streaming audio and video with NO WIRES! The potential products that could be developed are fantastic. A lounge room PC hooked up to a media file server ... add in a snazzy remote control device and you've finally got the home entertainment system we've all been dreaming of.

"Miracast certified devices will be able to deliver audio and video content from one device to another through a Wi-Fi connection, eliminating the need for cables. These devices will be able to connect directly, without the need of a wireless access point, making it possible to watch videos from a tablet on a big screen television or share a smartphone screen with the conference room projector. Televisions, set-top boxes, notebooks, tablets and handsets are among the types of devices which will be certified."

[Press Release]

Cher Wang talks about what it takes to be a tech success

Cher Wang, Chairwoman of HTC, married to VIA's CEO Wen-Chi Chen, spoke to Entrepreneur about her success and what made it possible ... an 'X' factor, the company culture, market forces? Cher's main answer is that it's a dedication to monitoring market demand and then providing what the customer wants.

Entrepreneur: When it comes to product development, how do you stay ahead of the curve? 

Wang: Keen observation. We must always keep an eye on our environment, to keep track of what changes are happening in technology, in infrastructure, in markets, in how people across the world are living their lives, working and communicating. We need to anticipate these trends and innovate to meet them. Within HTC, hundreds of ideas are tested and discarded to find those rare ideas that define the HTC user experience.

VIA granted a patent about identifying redundant data ... or something

I am not going to pretend to fully understand this patent. Patent 8229001 concerns an invention of VIA Technology's Eric Huang, and a method to identify coded_block_flag parameter ... er, or something like that. Here is the official information:

"The idea of video compression is to omit certain data of an image that are imperceptible to human's eyes, i.e. so-called visual redundancy. The data to be omitted are generally similar to other data in space or time dimension, and thus can be removed according to a compression algorithm. H.264/AVC is one of the mainstream standards of video compression. Compared to conventional digital video compression standards, such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4 or H.263, H.264 exhibits higher compression performance, and nevertheless reaches better image quality under the same compression ratio.

"The coding mechanism of H.264/AVC compression is block-based. In brief, an image frame is divided into a plurality of rectangular areas called as macroblocks (MB). The macroblocks are then encoded. First, intra-frame prediction and inter-frame prediction techniques are used to remove the similarities between images so as to obtain the residual differences. Then the residual differences are spatially transformed and quantized to remove the visual redundancy.

"An important factor of the high compression efficiency in H.364/AVC is the utilization of context adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC). Please refer to FIG. 1A, in which the operation of a CABAC decoder is briefly illustrated. For CABAC decoding, the decoder 10 executes a decoding operation for each block to generate a corresponding coded_block_flag parameter. The coded_block_flag parameter indicates whether a given block contains any non-zero residual difference or not. If there is no residual difference, the coded_block_flag parameter is set to '0' for the given block. Otherwise, the coded_block_flag parameter is set to '1' if there exists non-zero residual difference in the given block.

"The decoding operation of the decoder 10 is based on a context ID which includes a base portion and an offset portion. The base portion can be obtained by a lookup table, but the offset portion is calculated from the coded_block_flag. Therefore, a key point to calculate the coded_block_flag parameter is to obtain corresponding offset portion. For calculating the offset operation, the coded_block_flag parameters of neighboring left and top blocks next to the target block have to be determined in advance. For example, as illustrated in FIG. 1B, an image frame 11 encoded in H.264 is divided into a plurality of macroblocks 12, and each of the macroblock 12 is further divided into a plurality of blocks 13, e.g. M.times.N blocks K11.about.Kmn. For example, M=N=4 as illustrated in FIG. 1C shows the macroblock 12 is divided into 16 blocks labeled as 0.about.15 and each of the blocks 0.about.15 includes 4.times.4 pixels. The offset value of each block 13 is calculated according to coded_block_flag parameters of the neighboring left and top blocks of the current block.

"Due to the reason that characteristics of neighboring left or top blocks of each block may be different (e.g. size of each, inter or intra macroblock), H.264 utilizes a universal algorithm for calculating the offset value of all blocks. This would result in huge and complex computation since every block demands repeated processing. Consequently, hardware resource is occupied and causes large consumption of time. It can be realized that there exists a need to solve such deficiency."