Pixeltools

PixelTools Corporation has been providing MPEG solutions and products to customers since 1994. Anticipating the next step in our product line, we have been engaged in following and evaluating H.264 progress since mid-2002. Our focus is to serve the off-line content encoding market with a very flexible, high quality software implementation of H.264... reference software, similar to our current MPEG2 products such as MPEG Repair, DVD Expert, and Expert HD. As a first step, we are providing Expert H264, which provides windows interface for running the most current reference implementation of H.264. The interface is consistent with that of our newest high performance encoder, Expert HD, and provides the ability to encode from a variety of popular source formats and to monitor encoding progress through the encoding UI. In addition, we are providing value to the specification and reference implementation by providing the following: Global Rate Control. We are currently prototyping a client-side mechanism for global rate control. This mechanism provides soft control of overall bit rate, without interfering with the rate-distortion optimization at the macro block level. Performance Optimization. In Expert HD, our latest software encoder for MPEG-2, we have applied a variety of optimization techniques to retain our high flexibility and quality, while reducing execution times to reduce execution times by a factor 3 to 10. Some of these techniques are platform independent, while others take advantage of platform-specific capabilities such as Intel SSE-2. We are currently working closely with leading H.264 experts to employ fast motion estimation algorithms and performance optimization techniques to produce a fast, high flexibility and high quality software implementation of H.264 reference code behavior. Shrink-wrapped Package with GUI for Content Producers. We are extending our MPEG-Repair and DVD-Expert products to add H.264 encoding to the current MPEG 1 & 2 capabilities. Higher flexibility UIs will be extended to ...Read More