Sigma Designs is showing off its MPEG-4 decoder at QuickTime Live this week, which is being held until Thursday at the Beverly Hills Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. In fact Sigma’s technology was used in the opening keynote address when Ann Wettersten, vice president of Sun’s Wireless and Content Delivery Networks Group, showed the Apple and Sun demo.
The demonstration showed 1.5Mbps MPEG-4 streaming over Ethernet to a set-top box. Apple created the encoded content used by Sun’s streaming software to deliver to Sigma Designs’ MPEG-4 Set-top Platform with REALmagic Video Streaming Technology. Sigma’s new EM8470 chipset allows manufacturers to easily incorporate highly compressed MPEG-4 video over IP into a set-top box product.
“Sigma has long believed in the possibility of IP video streaming,” said Ken Lowe, vice president of business development at Sigma Designs. “By demonstrating their support and strength for this technology, heavy hitters like Apple and Sun are taking the great possibility of streaming, and turning it into a widespread reality.”
The EM8470 MPEG-4 decoder from Sigma is the first MPEG-4 decoder available for set-top boxes.
“QuickTime is the digital media standard for capturing, encoding and delivering content on the Internet, and it was also chosen as the basis for MPEG-4,” said Frank Casanova, Apple’s director of QuickTime Product Marketing. “We are happy that Sigma Designs was able to participate in our keynote address where we featured their set-top box solution as part of our interoperability demo showcasing MPEG-4.”