Most of the time we try to obey the 3 Bs: Better, Bigger, Bolder. This is also true for our marketing activities, as well as for our blog posts. But here’s a little secret I can tell you about our industry (and not just it): when it’s time to walk the walk, we are all slaves of the almighty RFP. As our industry caters mainly for large enterprises and government agencies, a lot of the deals out there are won
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 25th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
Last month I’ve stated that I don’t see visual communications done in software anytime soon. But then the question is when – when WILL visual communications be prominent in software solutions? I’d like to risk it and come up with an answer that is a bit counterintuitive even to me: never. Software is never going to be the path to go with visual communications. And why is that? Because as we get closer to a point in time, when the
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 4th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
[This post is part of our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] In my previous post I’ve discussed on the requirements from an OSD engine. These requirements will affect the decision making of chip selection for the OSD. But there is another aspect that affects that decision and it is the software you will use for visualization – the OSD engine. While I do not pretend to be an expert on GUI, I have
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | January 25th, 2010 | Filed under HD VoIP
[This post is part of our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] I already delved into the issue of the host in an HD video product design, where I also made a point of the fact that a hardware design for HD video is going to require several chips – one just isn’t capable of doing everything today. This means that there will be interaction between these chips, and this is not an issue you
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | January 4th, 2010 | Filed under HD VoIP
[This post is part of our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] It’s about time we deal with interfaces. Not the video ins and outs – I have already touched on that one. This time I want to discuss the interfaces that usually connect to a videophone product – and trust me, there are a bunch of options here. Yes, I’m talking peripherals here – those pesky things your end-users will end up connecting to
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | December 28th, 2009 | Filed under HD VoIP
[This post is part of our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] I’d like to take a bit of a break from all those hardware posts in my “HW for HD” series, now that I’ve covered the video coding chip, as well as scaling and layout issues. Instead I want to delve into the realm of designing the software architecture of the application itself. The hardware you design will affect your software architecture. As you
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | December 21st, 2009 | Filed under HD VoIP
There are three ways in which a service can be provided on a mobile handset these days: it can be integrated, downloaded or served from “the cloud”. The multi-Million dollar question is – which one is going to rule? A few years back, the only real way for a service to be noticed on a mobile device was by having it as an integrated part of the handset from day one. But these days, especially after the iPhone became the
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | December 14th, 2009 | Filed under Clients, Technology
This post is part of our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out! [While I've done my best to cover the various options for HD video chips and the trends in the market, I also wanted to take a deeper dive and explain how we analyze such a chip. In this case, the TI DM6467, which we have selected as the basis for our BEEHD product. For that, I asked Amit Klir, our resident video architecture
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By guest | November 16th, 2009 | Filed under HD VoIP
[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
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | November 9th, 2009 | Filed under HD VoIP
[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
