The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen, Germany, presented a combination of MPEG-4 and MPEG-4 High Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) for high quality, real time movie playback on ARM-based Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).

MPEG-4 AVC (and MPEG-4 HE-AAC are advanced video and audio codecs within the MPEG-4 multimedia standard, and the combination of these two guarantees audio and video quality at very low data rates. This is realized by optimized implementations for embedded processors.

With the MPEG-4 AVC Baseline Profile, optimized for Wireless MMXTM on Intel XScale PXA27x processors, a video resolution of up to QVGA (320x240 pixels) at 25 frames per second can be achieved. Together with MPEG-4 HE-AAC, which allows excellent audio quality for stereo content at bit rates of 48 kbit/s and below, high-quality movie playback on PDAs or other mobile devices finally turns into reality.

Harald Popp, head of the Multimedia Realtime Systems department at Fraunhofer IIS, is enthusiastic when he thinks about the possibilities the new development offers: "There are millions of portable devices like PDAs out there. Every single one can become a small movie theatre which you carry around in your pocket. No more annoying hours of waiting for delayed planes: Just turn on your PDA and enjoy a comedy or an action movie."