Video Communications, VideoChat, Surveillance, Digital Signage
The phrase "can you hear me now?" made famous by users of mobile phones will now have to be updated to "can you see me now?" Video has become the most valuable new functionality in consumer, corporate, industrial and military communications. Video technology has been available a long time ago but a perfect storm of enabling technologies has driven the unprecedented growth in IP video communication. These enabling technologies include: low cost cameras, both external and built into PCs and mobile devices; big increase in CPU power and special ASIC to process the compression and decompression of the video and by far the most important is the standardization on H.264 video format.
But this high demand is not without its challenges. Video applications must manage video end points with vastly different processing technologies, video resolution and frame rates and at varying bitrates and inadequate bandwidth. Traditionally this required the usage of very expansive video transcoding servers which were called MCUs. The newly accepted approach is to adopt a new H.264 video profile called Scalable Video Codec (SVC) instead of traditional AVC. This new profile allows for each end point to encode video simultaneously into a few different layers (SVC) as appose to one layer (AVC). This end point can then directly communicate with any other end point by selecting the appropriate SVC layers for each connection. VSS has developed the most powerful and comprehensive implementation of SVC Encoders and Decoders to meet the demand of the most challenging Video Communication applications. This SVC SDK can be used for any Windows, Linux or Mac Video Communication End Point or it can be used to create a Server based Video Gateway or Legacy Video Transcoding system. In addition to VSS PC SDK, VSS has developed a Video SDK for ARM based Mobile Devices. For more info, please visit the appropriate product pages.