We’ve been trying to cover the Syncrotek Fairchild codec since the first little slide was leaked. The slide and figures presented there revealed quite amazing performance, compression and low CPU requirements. When the report reached Doom9, a site know for its knowledge of codecs, the codec was harshly criticized and even accused of being BS. However we now know that the Fairchild codec has entered beta stage and much of the work up until now has been on keeping the CPU requirements low, right now a Pentium III 800MHz works just fine for 1080i compressed by Fairchild. There are four demo videos available at the Syncrotek website whereof two display the low CPU requirements of the codec.
Currently the HD compression hasn’t come as long as Syncrotek had wanted, but on the other hand, the mobile and NTSC compression parts are moving along nicely.
The two remaining demos display the envelope of compression of the NTSC and mobile parts. The 1Mbps demo shows of the realtime single pass limit, better quality can be achieved using higher bitrates and future implementations of multiple passes. The mobile demo demonstrates a live stream to small mobile device, such as a PDA or a phone, and thanks to the low CPU requirements video conferencing is more than feasible.
We will try to keep you posted on future updates of the Fairchild codec. Right now it seems quite promising, but it’s not quite complete yet. If you want to know more about the Fairchild codec we advise you to read our previous report.
