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[This post is taking part in our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!]

Last week I too k the time to map the different options of video coding chip solutions. There is one thing I left out, although it can be deduced from that post, and that’s the trends that exist in the video coding chip market.

As a quick recap, there are two main groups of solutions for video coding chips – those that are “pure” software, and those that rely on hardware. If we were to compare these different solutions by their price and flexibility, the resulting scatter graph would look similar to the one below:

Video Coding Chip Comparison: Price vs. Flexibility

Put simply:

• Hardware-based solutions are cheaper in their cost for the same amount of performance
• Software-based solutions are more flexible (with faster time to market)

I’d say that today, for a company to come out with a new video telephony client product, there are several viable options:

1. Software Based Solution

The only time a software solution should be selected is when the chip already exists in your planning for other purposes. In any other case – you should not choose a software only solution. Why? Because the price you will pay will increase the price of your product to a point where exiting solutions will be way cheaper – everyone else has already taken the leap towards a hardware solution.

What do I mean by having the chip there already? If you plan on doing a videophone for a laptop, then the Intel x86 chip that exist there will be suitable (a bit stressed to its limits though). This is what we do ourselves in our SCOPIA Desktop product.

2. Hardware Based Solution

This is the place where most companies should be focusing today: find a solid chip that can do hardware encoding – be it using acceleration, an FPGA or an ASIC, and then build the rest of your hardware design around it.

Your selection of the chip should take into consideration the following parameters:

• Do you need to interoperate with others? If you do, then make sure to find a flexible solution. An ASIC in this case may be risky.
• Is there a good video codec available for that chip? Has this video codec been used for video conferencing already or only for other purposes?
• What additional functionality will you be needing that can’t be addressed by this chip? How will they affect your design and cost structure?
• What interfaces does the chip offer? Do these map well to your requirements?

3. Hybrid Solution

In the case of the hybrid solution, software is used for decoding and hardware is used for encoding or vice versa. This allows reducing the cost of a pure software solution a bit by offloading part of the work it needs done to hardware.

While this solution exists and has been used in the past by video conferencing vendors, taking that route is risky and complex. My recommendation would be to stick with either a software solution or a hardware solution for your video coding chips selection – you’ll have more than enough on your hands to deal with in the hardware design so adding hybrids here will only complicate things further.

What Are Major Video Conferencing Vendors Doing These Days?

If you analyze the way that the major players in the video conferencing market selected the chips for their terminals, you will notice an interesting trend: most of them started with software-based solutions and later on migrated to hardware-based ones when it came to HD. The move was done at the point in time when HD started to show up – the cost of processing it with software-only solutions was higher than what the market was willing to pay, forcing companies to move to hardware solutions instead.

Video Telephony Migrates From Software to Hardware Based Chip Solutions

Today, most of the video conferencing companies base their solutions on the acceleration technology provided in the TI DM6467 chip (DaVinci HD) – and for good reason.

In my next post on this series, I’ll provide the case study of using the TI DM6467 for video coding.