Hantro 8190 Will Bring YouTube to Cell Phones

A few months ago, video codec vendor On2 announced its acquisition of Hantro, a company that offers licensable video codec accelerators and software.  At the Mobile World Congress in February, On2 unveiled the first offspring from the marriage—the Hantro 8190 licensable silicon IP core. The 8190 is a video decoder core that’s intended for use in chips targeting mobile handsets, and supports the Flash video format (FLV) used by YouTube and Facebook.  So if you get an 8190-equipped cell phone and it’s got Internet access, you’ll be able to play YouTube videos in the palm of your hand—assuming, of course, that you’re indoors and can actually see what’s on the tiny screen.

The Hantro 8190 supports H.264, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VC-1, and VP6 (a proprietary On2 compression format that, along with H.264 and Sorenson Spark, can be used to generate FLV files). The 8190 also supports JPEG still images up to 16 MP. According to On2, the core can decode H.264 High Profile, 1080p resolution video at 30 fps with a clock frequency under 165 MHz. The IP block is configurable; licensees can choose a subset of the available codecs and resolutions to minimize silicon area.

On2’s acquisition of Hantro was a smart move for both companies.  As we’ve previously noted, this kind of consolidation may be just what the video IP market needs. In this case, On2 had been successful in desktop video applications, but because of the growing popularity of mobile video, the company needed to move into the embedded space—where Hantro has a strong presence. Hantro, on the other hand, needed to expand its target markets by offering more codec implementations—such as On2’s popular VP6. By combining efforts, On2 and Hantro are able to offer a more complete—and therefore, more attractive—solution to their customers, and encompass a wider variety of video formats and resolutions for both desktop and mobile applications.

With programmable processing engines becoming more powerful (a good example is the ARM Cortex-A8 with NEON) and the number of video codecs expanding, one may well ask whether fixed-function engines will continue to be competitive. In our view, fixed-function engines still make sense in many battery-powered applications (like cell phones) because they are more energy efficient than user-programmable processors.  But user-programmable processors may be recruited to handle video codec work when developers want to add new codecs that aren’t supported by the phone’s hardwired engine.  There’s room for both approaches, and with the 8190, On2 appears to be in a good position to take advantage of the growing demand for portable digital video solutions.