Paris, France

Actimagine develops and licenses software that allows video to be displayed on a variety of mobile devices.

Actimagine’s software renders high quality, TV-like images on handheld and mobile displays using very low CPU processing power. This dramatically reduces power consumption, resulting in a much longer battery life for mobile devices. Actimagine has also patented a strong digital rights management solution that allows for the protection of any type of content when it is stored on a memory card and played using Actimagine’s software. Actimagine is targeting the consumer electronics and mobile handset markets. Currently headquartered in Paris, with a branch office in Japan, the company has recently opened an office in the U.S. where it plans to begin expanding its business development efforts.

www.actimagine.com

Mobiclip is a full software video codec. It does not require any hardware modification.

Mobiclip is based on a proprietary patented algorithm. Mobiclip offers a very high compression ratio, 2 times better than MPEG-4 and 5% better than H.264 Baseline but requires significantly fewer CPU cycles to decode.

Compared with other video codecs, Mobiclip has been developed on a completely different algorithm, based on lower CPU requirements to substantially extend the battery-life of mobile handsets and to reduce the cost of devices.

For example, Mobiclip displays consume just half of the capacity of MPEG-4 files and an eighth of the battery-drain of the H.264 Baseline.

As a further illustration, on a Nokia N73, Mobiclip can play around seven hours of high-quality video, compared with just one and a half hours using MPEG-4. Any video source file can be converted into Mobiclip format: AVI, ASF, DivX, MPEG, REAL, VOB, WMV.

On mobile phones, Mobiclip is compatible with all open operating systems including Palm OS, Brew, Embedded Linux, Symbian, Windows Mobile.

A video codec is a software module that enables video compression or decompression of digital video. The word codec may be a combination of any of the following: ‘Compressor-Decompressor’, ‘Coder-Decoder’, or ‘Compression/Decompression algorithm’. Codecs encode a stream or signal for transmission, storage, or encryption and decode it for viewing or editing.

Original video source files are usually very big and therefore hard to store and to transfer. Video compression refers to reducing the quantity of data used to represent video images.

Video codecs have become a part of everyday life. The signal from a TV satellite dish, the information on a DVD or video from the internet all have one thing in common: they all use compression techniques for data transfer. The basic principle is the same for all methods – the source stream is analyzed and filtered of all redundant and irrelevant information. The receiving end then decompresses the signal using the codec to display the data on the device screen.

Audio and video call for customized methods of compression. Engineers and mathematicians have tried a number of solutions for tackling this problem. There is a complex balance between the video quality, the quantity of the data needed to represent it, also known as the bit rate, the complexity of the encoding and decoding algorithms, robustness to data losses and errors, ease of editing, random access, the state of the art of compression algorithm design, end-to-end delay, and a number of other factors.