ATI Technologies is publicly demonstrating high-definition H.264 video playback with hardware acceleration on the PC platform at Computex 2005 in Taipei, Taiwan. H.264 is a video compression standard that will be used in the next generation high-definition video players such as Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

H.264 is designed to have two to three times the compression efficiency of current schemes such as MPEG-2, while simultaneously improving overall image quality. This increased compression efficiency is computationally demanding, therefore graphics hardware assistance is crucial for real-time decoding of high bit-rate video, according to ATI.

The ATI demonstration at Computex features H.264 playback with Radeon technology and a CyberLink video player application. In addition to hardware acceleration of H.264, the Radeon processor is performing next-generation video processing and demonstrating display capabilities, ATI reports.

 www.ati.com