The rapid introduction and availability of the VP8 decoder for the ZMS processors highlights just how easily the performance of the underlying StemCell Computing architecture can be leveraged to support rapidly emerging industry standards such as VP8 and the WebM format. The optimized VP8 implementation takes full advantage of the programmability and performance of the ZMS processors' StemCell media array to deliver smooth playback of WebM content at resolutions up to 1080p.

• 1080p VP8 Codec support for Smooth WebM video playback
• Accelerated on ZMS processors StemCell media array
• Offloads the ARM CPU

Demonstration : VP8 @ 1080P

The Computex tradeshow in May, 2011 saw the first public demonstration of ZiiLABS 1080p implementation of the VP8 codec on its JAGUAR Android 3.0 reference tablets. Based on the the ZMS-20 processor the JAGUAR platform provide OEMs and ODMs a range of Android 3.x compliant 7" and 10" tablet solutions that can be customized and taken to market.

CODEC Implementation : The StemCell Advantage

Many traditional video processing engines support multi-format codecs by building on a library of hard-coded video functions designed to support established video standards such as MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV and H.264. While this approach is appropriate in many cases such a hardware-centric approach can limit the ability to support emerging video standards or tune the codec for different use cases, e.g. high-quality movie watching vs internet based video conferencing. Even subtle differences in codec specification can require modifications to the underlying hardware if the performance and quality of a codec implementation is not to fall below that expected by the end-user. Such "silicon" changes take time to implement, test and reach the market.

The ZMS processors take a different approach. By leveraging the full programmability of the StemCell media processing array allows a high-quality, fully optimized VP8 codec to be implemented that can enable 1080p WebM playback, yet can be delivered via a software update rather than requiring a re-design of the core silicon.

About WebM

WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web and supported in HTML5 and on most browsers. WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska container.

For more information on WebM visit: http://www.webmproject.org