March 2009
Intermediate to advanced
576 pages
17h 24m
English
Now that cell phones have morphed into portable media players (PMPs), consumers expect to be able to carry dozens of videos, hundreds of pictures and thousands of songs along with them. The previous two chapters dealt with the storage problems this presents. This chapter deals with your first line of defense: codecs.Codecs compress audio and video not only to conserve storage but also to reduce the bandwidth required to transport these data streams. Successive generations of codecs have achieved higher compression ratios resulting in smaller streams and file sizes. Still, the trade-off is the computational requirements to perform the compression. Application processors typically offload audio and graphics processing ...