[This post is taking part in our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] One of the most burning issues involved with designing a video telephony device is where the video codec is going to reside. The reason is that this is by far the most CPU intensive task of the whole system, especially when going up to high definition. I’d like to discuss the various options that exist today on the market, with their relative
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | November 2nd, 2009 | Filed under HD VoIP
It seems like the multi-core revolution is here. Not just all around us, but even in our very own blog community. Recently, two posts by my colleagues discussed multi-cores: Ofer Goren, guest posting on Code of Contact, about his share of optimizations done for a multi-core platform for our SIP Stack, and Sagee discussing the utilization of multi-core processors for video coding. As Sagee puts it: Designing and writing “great code” is the ultimate goal for every software developer. However,
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | May 4th, 2009 | Filed under Technology
FierceVoIP provides the highlights of an Infonetics report about VoIP and IMS. Finally, IMS is starting to gain a bit of momentum. Their observation, that IMS is making headway in fixed-line while mobile will come later, is similar to my own feeling these days from customer visits. Last week GrandCentral was rebirthed as Google Voice. It was blogged all over the blogosphere. What caught my eye is Dean’s thoughts on the subject over at VoIP User.
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | March 19th, 2009 | Filed under Around the net
iPhone 3G is by far the most hyped phone (or even product) out there today. Everything about it is great – even though you can’t get coverage, have lousy battery life, buggy OS updates and general instability when you call, the party in the Apple AppStore is going on without a stop, with over 30 million dollars of sales in the first month alone. iPhone iPhone really changed the mobile handsets market. Other than making the concept of downloading applications
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | August 28th, 2008 | Filed under Clients
IntoMobile reports that Samsung also ditched Linux on one of its planned handsets, that after Asus did the same – this is counterintuitive to my thoughts on Linux on mobile, but I still stand by my conclusions – Windows Mobile is going to lose some ground if it doesn’t do something earth shattering soon. UC is not just about communications and it is also overhyped – I totally agree. Up to the point of there’s no such thing as UC. Skype might have a back door for governments to eavesdrop – there’s no security in proprietary protocols, only in open standards. Some shameless self-promotion – we just released our eVident product, which allows companies to test their networks for video deployment readiness.
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | August 11th, 2008 | Filed under Around the net
Interesting times in the mobile handsets arena. VisionMobile maps the new centers of gravity in this industry. I believe competition will lag behind Apple’s iPhone in their next release as well as copycatting its ideas and designs. Talking about the iPhone – I am thinking of starting a petition to ban iPhone from Google Alerts for 3G video. For the past two weeks I am getting nothing from that service besides iPhone jailbreaks and teardowns. Growing bandwidth and increasing CPU power will change television as we know it. It will also speed up the use of video telephony adoption and quality and this fits well with the trend of multi-core diversification I have written about. You can add to this TiVo’s two new deals with YouTube and Amazon – it’s only the beginning. HD is seen by some as the true promise of VoIP – this is certainly different than the Unified Communications pitch. What happens when you don’t have enough bandwidth though?
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 28th, 2008 | Filed under Around the net
In case you haven’t noticed, multi-core processing is happening. We’ve already covered multi-core aspects that relate both to servers and clients. For clients, I’ve previously focused on video communications, but there is another aspect on the client side that is important to note – for clients, multi-core is a game of diversification, not only multiplication. Multi-core, as previously discussed and as promoted today to the mass market, is all about multiplication. Take a general purpose CPU and multiply it
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 14th, 2008 | Filed under Clients
Danny Loeb provided his insights on the effect of multicore on SIP servers, but what about video communication clients? Up until today, there is a tendency to either push multi-core hardware as the next best thing (mainly by the relevant chipset vendors) or to dismiss it for most uses. While that has been true up until today, it’s popularity is changing – the latest evidence being Skype version 4.0 beta release, which is video-centric. There is a multitude of other
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 3rd, 2008 | Filed under Clients
[I've had a chat the other day with a colleague of mine, Danny Loeb, who is the Product Manager for our SIP Server Platform. As part of his work, he needs to deal with the multi-core trend and how that changes the architecture of his product.] Multi-core is all the rage these days. Or at least this is what Intel tell us – almost every month Intel arranges a seminar, workshop, training or some other session about multi-core here in
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By guest | April 21st, 2008 | Filed under Technology
