Encode & stream H.264 in real time

29th April 2015

Renesas

Nat Bowers

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Renesas Electronics Europe has announced the availability of its 'Stream it!' kit, a complete evaluation platform for H.264 encoding and streaming in real-time. The kit includes all the hardware, software components and demonstration programs manufacturers need to start development of cost-optimised video surveillance systems, video door phones, access control and intrusion detection systems.

Renesas’ 'Stream it!' kit enables designers of advanced security and multimedia applications to develop scalable systems with the shortest time-to-market, reduced component count and optimised PCB footprint. The 'Stream it!' kit comes pre-loaded with the H.264 encode and stream demonstration, but can also run two additional streaming demonstrations included in the kit. For developers of industrial sensor and home automation systems, the 'Stream it!' kit can be used to log sensor status information, while sharing the collected data on a web server. For streaming applications targeting the consumer segment, internet radio MP3 files can be streamed to the 'Stream it!' kit, decoded and played over headphones.

In the pre-loaded video streaming demonstration, a CMOS camera module is connected to RZ/A1L’s capture engine unit and captures video in YUV format. The video stream is subsequently encoded using H.264 technology with up to 40FPS. RTP packets are streamed using FreeRTOS and the UDP/IP stack and played on the PC side VLC player.

The resolution can later be scaled by the system designer by choosing different variants of the Cortex-A9 based RZ/A series with increasing sizes of embedded frame buffer RAM. It is limited to VGA in the cost-optimised 'Stream it!' implementation. Various parameters can flexibly be configured from the USB console, such as IP addressing mode, remote IP address and port, video resolution, video frame rate and video bit rate.

In addition to being based on the industry leading RZ/A series, the software package includes H.264 encode/decode technology by Consilient Technologies as well as web server and multimedia streaming technology by Oryx-embedded.

The solution kit includes the 'Stream it!' board, a camera module, compiler, debugger, IDE and demonstration software – everything engineers need to start their development of streaming, security and multimedia applications. It will be available for immediate ordering via Renesas' franchised distribution partners. The solution kit's part name is YSTREAM-IT-RZ.