Canvid Video Codec Information

Although there are die-hard fans of Apple and Real, but the B2B and consumer content market is dominated by the MPEG and the H26x codec’s. The major supplier of the MPEG format is Microsoft with its latest codec VC-1. Adobe/Macromedia products and services are based upon H264 standard and it gives flash big advantage over VC-1. Canvid Codec used by our sister company, is H264 Hybrid. The Hybrid version is better in performance than the standard H264 as it contains additional tools to gain higher efficiencies on the following features of H264 codec:

  • Play video streams ranging from mobile applications to high definition format 720p and 1080i in real time.
  • Degree of control over motion estimation settings which controls the balance between encoder speed and quality.
  • Amount of reference frames of any combination of past and future frames, which provides precise inter-prediction as well as improved robustness during packet loss while streaming over the network or Internet.
  • Motion search uses reference frames that may be partly outside the frame improving network performance by predicting missing data.
  • The level of the difference between motion vectors saving, which leads to increasing the compression ratio.
  • Intra-prediction is performed on 16x16 blocks.
  • Motion vector prediction is performed before the frame is prepared for compression (pre-DCT) improving prediction and compression performance
  • A context-sensitive de-blocking filter smoothes out internal edges, significantly improving the visual quality of the video. The filter strength depends upon the prediction modes and relationship between the neighboring blocks.
  • Employs Context-Adaptive Variable Length Coding (CAVLC) to encode transform coefficients.
  • The Context-Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC) method continually updates frequency statistics of the incoming data and adaptively adjusts the algorithm, improving compression performance.

Overall, Canvid delivers same quality of video as other codecs but at 1/4 of the bit rate. This major advantage allows companies to keep their rich media delivery cost to minimum.

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