It seems like a fight has started over the communication device on our desktops. Not the fight over voice – that one has already been fought and won time and again by the ubiquitous desktop phone, with some signs of the mobile handset providing any serious competition to its reign. What I am talking about is the fight over visual communications: doing video chat and video conferencing from your desk, wherever that is. Here’s a list of the current contestants:
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 8th, 2010 | Filed under Clients, Technology
[This post is part of our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] Time to talk about OSD. That is the On Screen Display (OSD). This is what users will see besides the actual video streams, the Graphical User Interface (GUI), so there’s a lot of reasons to spend some time around it. It is also something that causes a lot of headaches for hardware designers, especially in the seamless, iPhone-inspired era of interfaces we live
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | January 18th, 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!] In the last two posts of this series, I’ve dealt with the layouts required for a videophone. In these posts, I’ve shown the range of different layouts that are used in today’s video conferencing terminals, and I’ve even hinted that scaling (up and down) the video streams is often required to support the various layouts. I’d like to elaborate a bit further in
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | December 14th, 2009 | Filed under HD VoIP
[This post is taking part in our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] In my last post, I discussed the different layouts that are required by a video endpoint, focusing mainly on the basics – single video source, single display. This leaves a lot to be desired, both on consumer videophones and on enterprise video phones. I’d like to address this post what happens when you want to go to the enterprise market with a
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | December 7th, 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 tried to cover the video inputs and outputs, which are necessary in videophone design. This time I want to talk about what types of video feeds you would want to see on your monitor(s) and how they would be displayed. The Basics Let’s start with the basics. I’ll assume you have a monitor that supports 720p resolution for the
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | November 30th, 2009 | Filed under HD VoIP
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!] This is the first real post in this series, so I’d like to start off with the reason for writing this series. We’ve set out here to create a product to assist customers with developing a high definition video client – our BEEHD. The main “theme” behind this product is to reduce the hassles involved with dealing with standards and video coding
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | October 26th, 2009 | Filed under HD VoIP
I’ve already coined the term “unattended software spoils faster than yogurt in the desert sun.” It deals with my preference of hardware over software. I guess that having this come from a software guy is a bit weird, but it is still true. In regards to the visual communications industry, it applies even more. We’ve just released our BEEHD product, which allows others to build and manufacture hardware based videophones. We’ve also just announced our partnership with Samsung, together creating
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 2nd, 2009 | Filed under Clients
