Last month Cradle introduced the CT3600 family, the successor to its original CT3400 chip. The CT3600 family—which includes the CT3608, CT3612, and CT3616—will offer major improvements over the CT3400 in the areas of parallelism, clock rates, and on-chip integration. Like the CT3400, the CT3600 family will primarily target digital video applications, particularly multi-channel surveillance applications.

At first glance, measuring processor performance on multimedia applications can seem straightforward. Many multimedia applications are based on published standards and widely available software. For example, MPEG-4 video decompression software is available for most popular processors. Because such software is often readily available, measuring multimedia performance may seem to be a simple matter of checking the processor vendor's published performance data for the relevant software modules.

Processor vendors targeting signal processing applications have put a lot of emphasis on compilers over the last few years. Many of the new processor announcements I’ve seen recently stress “compiler friendliness” as one of the main advantages of the new architecture. And vendors like to boast about the enormous amounts of time and money they’ve spent improving their compilers.

Digital video found its first big consumer market in DVD players, and has moved on from there. Now you can buy digital set-top boxes, camcorders, personal video recorders (PVRs), portable media players, and even digital-video-enabled cell phones. Products that can only handle analog video will soon be extinct; they’ll be relegated to technology museums, sitting next to vinyl records and eight-track tape players.

To create a successful digital video product, you need to choose the right processor. Sounds simple—but of course, it isn’t. A big part of the challenge is that there are so many types of processors from which to choose: general-purpose CPUs, FPGAs, DSPs, configurable processors, and fixed-function chips, among others.

Digital video technology is reshaping our lives, changing everything from how we entertain ourselves to how we protect ourselves. As digital technologies become pervasive, they are making video products more affordable, convenient, and sophisticated. In this article, we explore major developments in three digital video application areas: home entertainment, mobile video, and surveillance.

Home entertainment

Implementing real-time video processing functions in software is a challenging task. In this article we explore the particularly difficult challenges presented by video compression algorithms. Although we focus on video compression algorithms, the ideas and techniques in this article also apply to other types of video processing software.

What’s Unique about Video Software?

A few years ago, it seemed obvious that we were on the verge of a major change in how consumers obtain and view movies at home. There would be no more schlepping out to the video store to rent a DVD; with the increasing availability of digital video content on the Internet, it seemed clear that everyone would shift to streaming video, to video-on-demand, to any-movie-anytime-with-no-late-fees. The video stores all would close down and become Starbucks cafes or yoga studios.