Video services represent a powerful business driver for 3G and broadband communications.

AudioCodes Media Servers (IPmedia™) enabled by the 8410 video blades allow Service Providers and Application Service Providers (ASP) to expand existing audio and voice services to include richer video offerings. The target market for the IPmedia video offering is the IMS Media Resource Function (MRF), focusing on Real-Time Multimedia services.

These services include: conversational video telephony for business applications (appraisal, medical, advice), consumer shopping (“See What I see”), multi-point Audio and Video conferencing, multi-party gaming and messaging/streaming (Live/personalized Video broadcasting, Video mail, Video IVR, Personalized greeting, Video greeting cards, Video Ringback Tones) requiring high performance DSP based for transcoding/trans-rating/re-sizing Video streams to large subscriber counts.

The IPmedia™ media server products support the following video applications:

• Video conferencing (video phones, and desktop video phones)
• Mobile video conferencing
• Transcoding Mobile video streams (from RTP servers)

The video functionalities introduced with release 5.2 include transcoding and transrating (adaptation of the video content to the end user handset) for many types of end devices over cellular, Wi-Fi, and fixed networks, overcoming the lack of multimedia compatibility between handsets, using different video codecs, different screen resolutions, different bit rates and more.

Version 5.2 supports industry standards such as the commonly used video codecs MPEG4 and H.263.

Video capabilities within IPmedia™ are available for applications using both H.248 and SIP to control the media processing.

The Video Conferencing functionality:

• Video Conference creation (up to 9 participants in a single conference)
• Switched Mode – Single view of the active speaker. Voice activated switching between users.
• Continuous Mode – The screen view is split according to the number of participants in the conference (1x1, 2x2, and 3x3).
• Resolution: QCIF (144x176), CIF (288x352)
• Transcoding: converting from MPEG-4 to H.263 and vise versa. H.264 planned for next major version.
• Transrating: Adjusting encoded video bit rate.
• Video Resizing: resizing of video resolution according to the target terminal resolution
• Support of up to 200 concurrent video channels

Transcoding Mobile video streams functionality (SIP):

• The application server sends INVITE to the IPmedia to open up a media stream between the RTP server and the video client (e.g. Mobile Handset) describing the transcoding parameters within the SDP.

• The IPmedia performs transcoding on the video stream to adapt it to the video client capabilities.
• Transcoding: converting from MPEG-4 to H.263 and vise versa. H.264 planned for next major version.
• Resolution: Converting from CIF (288x352) to QCIF (144x176)
• Transrating: Adjusting encoded video bit rate.
• Video Resizing: resizing of video resolution according to the target terminal resolution
• Support of up to 200 concurrent video channels

The figure below summarizes the IPmedia MRF Video capabilities: