Ahead Software, leaders in digital media technology and developer of the award winning Nero applications, and Ateme, today announced that Sigma Designs, a leader in digital media processing for consumer appliances, will include Nero Digital™ support in the Sigma EM85xx platform for next-generation DVD players and consumer electronics products.

"Sigma Designs is uniquely positioned to provide versatile, high performance chip solutions that meet the global needs for an optimal consumer experience, said John Tafoya, VP of business development of Ahead Software, Other MPEG-4 solutions have promised a home theatre experience but lacked the MPEG-4 audio component. "We are excited to be working with Sigma Designs to bring the Nero Digital™ experience to Consumer Electronic manufacturers and, to consumers".

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/h...iewID=news_view

Excellent!

Why do all press releases sound as if modesty was a plague these days?

What are diff. between MPEG-4 and Nero Digital for video?

AAC audio ?

"Nero Digital" is the name of a set of mpeg4 tools, so it is a specific implementation of mpeg4 natural video/natural audio.

This means hardware support for MP4, both audio and video, doesn't it? If so, that's great

If there are too many 'flavours' of MPEG4 around ( DivX, XviD, ND, 3ivX, etc. ) and a decoder chip manufacturer like SIGMA will have to add support for each of them separately, i wonder what the MPEG4 standard is good for ?

Is the MPEG4 standard maybe too powerful, and as a result too complex, so every software developer making MPEG4 encoding tools will finally create his own 'subset' or 'profile' of the specs, and each has to be supported separately ?

To avoid any bad conclusions, i am now talking about MPEG4, the video compression, not MP4 the container ( no MP4 vs. matroska flamewars here pls. ).

In other words : i dont quite understand why SIGMA had to add specific support for Nero Digital on a technical level, assuming its all plain and spec comformant MPEG4 video, like DivX5, XviD and 3ivX ?

Is all this maybe nothing but a simple marketing requirement, like to create a counterweight to the 'DivX certified' dominance for all earlier standalones on the market ? Or is there a technical background also, like they finally added MP4 parsing and AAC decoding to their firmware ?

Sigma doesn't add specific support for Nero Digital, but MPEG4 support by using the Nero Digital implementation.

Nero Digital profiles are closely tied with the MPEG profiles and levels. I.e. we didn't invent hot water and came up with some strange combination of audio and video profiles incompatible with MPEG-4 guidelines.

Process of forming these was very long and careful - as we wanted to make highest possible quality within current and near-future market possibilities. Sigma is a great example of that. Also we are investing in future with advanced profiles, but more about that will probably be revealed by some press release

Nero Digital logo would certify that a system flawlessly reads content authored with Nero Digital codecs - which is a big plus for a consumer, as he would be sure that his device is fully compatible. In addition to that - ND logo will mean implicitly (not explicitly as that wouldn't be possible) interoperability with other MPEG-4 vendors as we are also doing interop tests inside MPEG industry forum.

And, for the first time - ND Logo standardizes all aspects of Nero Digital system - including AAC audio, which is something other logo programs lacked. And, all of the components are fully compatible with the relevant ISO/IEC and ITU standards.

Does it mean AAC: LC-AAC and HE-AAC ? For simple audio files too? Would be nice

There are couple of profiles - some of them are LC-AAC only, some are supporting HE-AAC (including 5.1 channels) and, of course, most advanced ones will also use new extensions. Sorry I couldn't tell more, but as soon as this information becomes public I'll post on HA

And, yes - supporting Nero Digital also means supporting MP4 file format, and subtitles and chapter marks embedded in the NeroDigital MP4 file.

there is no difference and it doesnt matter which codec was used when a standalone supports .mp4 files

every mpeg-4 stream placed in .mp4 is totally equal, no matter which encoder produced it, thats the nice thing about .mp4, it ensures interoperability (its like it doesnt matter what encoder produced a .mp3 file)
its not like with AVI, where every mpeg-4 codec has its own FourCC, making it impossible for other mpeg-4 decoders ot play this stream (without workarounds)

the only problems can be caused by what mpeg-4 profile is followed during encoding:
but as the new sigma design chip will handle full advanced simple profile @ level 5 (asp@l5), all encodes by divx5, xvid, 3ivx, nero digital aso... will be playable (with the exception of the GMC option, which the chip doesnt handle - i assume GMC is somewhat CPU intensive as the mediatek chip also handles full ASP@L5, but also not GMC)


as i said the correct expression for the profile we need, as defined in mpeg-4, is ASP@L5, which the sigma chip handles (the only exclusion is GMC)


there is no reason for private profiles, thats just a marketing move, for brainwashing newbies, not knowing what mpeg-4 means


yep, its marketing, as the specs of the sigma chip made clear that it supports ASP@L5 on the video side
on the audio side, they made clear that it supports LC-AAC decoding

and MP4 is only the container, where the supported streams are placed into

I'm not sure completely, but seems that problem is not in math power but in lazy developers
It seems to me, that it is similiar to LTP profile in AAC - it consumes much more power for encoding, a bit more power for decoding and produce near *no* effect.
The result is slightly better than w/o it, but all the developers think it is not worth it...

There are no "private profiles" at least not for Nero Digital logo - Nero Digital guidelines are completely based on MPEG-4 profiles and levels when it comes to video. Problem is, apart from MPEG-4 video - Nero Digital incorporates other things and extra information is needed to clearly limit encoder in order not to produce content which can't be played on something.

Now, instead of filling 20 lines of text what device supports - it is easier to put "Nero Digital - Mobile Profile"

3GPP and ISMA also define their own guidelines (which we also adhere to in mobile profiles) - and also they're based on, say, MPEG-4 Simple Profile, Level 1 etc...

well all it needs is writing
"for video we support MPEG-4 ASP@L5
for audio we support MPEG-4 AAC-LC
both placed in the MP4 container"

its all there in the mpeg-4 standard itself, how things have to be called...

but of course i understand that companies prefer if DIVX or NERO DIGITAL is printed in big letters on the device


what for example? i hope nothing, which excludes other mpeg-4 encoders!

Well, it's not that simple - for example you have follwing things:

#1 - first, you have several distinct markets (mobile, home use, high-definition)

#2 - Apart from the profile and level for audio and video (which basically define the mandatory and non-mandatory algorithms and ranges of some specific parameters), there are other parameters which are relevant to the industry/market - i.e. , maximum and avg data rate, typical resolution and aspect ratio, maximum number of audio channels, maximum and typical sampling rate, etc...

#3 - Apart from this, Nero Digital offers subtitle and chapter-marks, so more entries for the table.

So, all in all - to make this short, final result is one very big table - so it is a wise idea both commercial-wise and customer-friendly-wise to call each typical setting a "ND Profile" and make life easier for consumers and implementators.

Same thing goes for ISMA Profile 0, or 3GPP, like I said - altough both are MPEG-4 Simple Profile with LC AAC audio - but with some additional parameter limitations.

hm ok, but as the divx profiles already showed, the only profile used anyways was their home theater profile


i cant speak for audio, but in the mpeg-4 video profiles/levels these things are defined already
so a private profile would only makes sense if you have other limits than the official mpeg-4 profiles

and still i fear, and as the divx profiles showed, that private profiles will always set the standard on the minimum level, so that it can be supported whereever possible (good for the companies if their logo is on as much as devices as possible)

this focusing at the worst chip existing when creating the profiles will limit of course the usable settings and therefore of course also the quality (as its the case with the divx profiles already)
now if i read that nero digital (together with its profiles i assume) will be supported on the old sigma chipset too (one of the worst chips existing), than i can only say that this profile is not worth it, as it will for example exclude qpel and gmc, which hurts the quality a lot.
thats surely nothing suitable for users.

if nero would have said: no, we dont care about supporting outdated first generation chips, we include advanced coding tools, like qpel, in our profile, for ensuring that our users can enjoy the best quality possible everywhere, it would have been something different...

so if my speculation is right, that the nero "home use" profile will exclude qpel and gmc, i can only say:
"give me a player which supports full MPEG-4 ASP@L5, as the standard defines it! i dont care about the rest"


right, nices feature btw

and of course i have to say THANK YOU to ahead for supporting the container format defined in the mpeg-4 standard, MP4, and not some proprieatary fud, as many other companies prefer to use for excluding competitors
this ensures that also files not created with nero tools, will be usable on "nero digital players" and thats something we have to respect

Btw, regarding the chips and support - there was a very very long debate how to address all issues (which chips to support, and which features to add and I can assure you that the best trade-off was made

But, I am not in position to announce profiles yet - so I must say "stay tuned"



Well - it all depends on business intentions of the company and their success with pushing their solutions in various markets, etc, etc... DivX users are almost 100% people who encode DVDs, which translates in your figure perfectly

Does this mean the players will not support Nero encoded AAC files placed in a M4A container?

M4A == MP4

Only the extension changes.

I realize that, I should have worded my question better. If I burn a data CD of 100 AAC encoded songs from itunes library (all having the M4A extension), will it play in one of these new players?

Or 1st do I have to mass convert the extensions from M4A to MP4, and if so, will this mess up the tag info?

Thanks.

This would be so great but unfortunately in real world buggy implementations exist (most common issues are qpel rounding, interlaced support, etc) and therefore decoders need to apply the correct work around depdending on the encoder/version used.

GMC *is* power intensive on the decoder side.

Anyway, I guess GMC doesn't collect much success because it's quite hard to convert its additionnal computing overhead into very higher coding efficiency. I may be wrong, but I don't know any encoder able to exploit GMC extremely well.

yep, i thought so

i think it also depends on how powerful the GMC implementation is, as afaik currently 3 of the 4 existing mpeg-4 decoder chips handle GMC with 1 warppoint (as used in divx5), but not the more powerful GMC with 3 warppoints (as used in xvid and nero digital)

what about HE-AAC? is SBR much more power consuming than without SBR or is the lack of support more a license issue?

It would not mess up tag info, if it would be necessary.

The SBR part takes extra power, which is partially compensated by the normal decoding only have to work at half the samplerate.

It is an extra chunck of code that the decoder needs though.

PS. SBR is layered on top of LC-AAC, so "LC-AAC" doesn't imply that it doesn't support SBR ( I dont know if it does )

SBR decoding is more power consuming than LC-AAC but it brings more than significant improvement in audio quality to faciliate implementation.

Licensing model for SBR is no different from LC-AAC, apart from the small increase in unit fee.

So, these are not really reason for current lack of support - it was more the time-to-market issue, since SBR was standardised a little bit than year ago - so at time current CE devices were designed, there were no optimized solutions for particular DSP, or VLSI implementations.

This is already changing, and in the very near future market will have all necessary components and building blocks readily available.