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H.264 Main Profile Encoder

The H264-MP-E core from Alma Technologies is an advanced H.264 hardware encoder that conforms to the Main Profile of the ITU-T H.264 standard. The core is also available in ALL-Intra (H264-MPI-E) and Light Motion Estimation engine (H264-MP-E-LME) encoding configurations and supports the real time encoding of video streams up to Profile Level 5.2. Encoding in the Constrained Baseline Profile is also supported.

The encoder accepts the uncompressed video data in planar, interleaved, or macroblock scan format. It outputs standalone, standard compliant, Annex B NAL byte stream. No post processing on the output stream, other than (for example) stroring, muxing or transmitting, is required. The output NAL byte stream can be decoded, as is, by any ITU-T H.264 compliant decoder that satisfies the Level requirements of the stream and conforms to the Main, or higher, ITU-T H.264 Profile.

H264-MP-E requires minimal host intervention as it only needs to be programmed once per video sequence. Once programmed, it can encode an arbitrary number of video frames without needing any CPU or other type of support by the host system.

The H264-MP-E core implements a simple and flexible, requests based, external memory interface with independent read and write data paths. This makes the H264-MP-E independent of memory type, supporting for example operation with SRAM, SDRAM, DDR, DDR2 and DDR3 types of memory. The encoder is designed to be tolerant to memory delays and latencies, which may be present on shared memory system architectures.

The H264-MP-E core is designed with simple, fully controllable and FIFO-like, streaming input and output interfaces. Being carefully designed, rigorously verified and silicon-proven, the H264-MP-E is a reliable and easy-to-use and integrate IP.