MPEG2 video encoding in consumer electronics

Only very recently, single-chip MPEG2 video encoders are being reported. They are a result of additional interest in encoding in consumer products, apart from broadcast encoding, where a video encoder contains several expensive chips. Only single-chip solutions are cost-effective enough to enable digital recording for the consumer. The professional broadcast encoders are expensive because they use the full MPEG toolkit to guarantee good image quality, at the lowest possible bit-rate. Some MPEG tools are costly in hardware and these are therefore not feasible in single-chip solutions. This results in higher bit-rates, that can be accepted because of the available channel and storage capacity of the latest consumer storage media, harddisk, digital tape (D-VHS) and Digital Versatile Disk (DVD). A consumer product is I.McIC, a single-chip MPEG2 video encoder. It operates in ML@SP mode which can be decoded by all MPEG2 decoders. The IC is highly-integrated, as it contains motion-estimation and compensation, adaptive temporal noise filtering and buffer/bit-rate control. The high-throughput functions of the MPEG algorithm are mapped onto pipelined dedicated hardware, whereas the remaining functions are processed by an application-specific instruction-set processor. Software for this processor can be downloaded, in order to suit the IC for different applications and operating conditions. The IC consists of several communicating processors which were designed using high-level synthesis tools, PHIDEO and DSP Station(TM).