I recently bought an iPod Touch. The WiFi integration is neat and worked straight out of the box. I now have a pocketable Internet browser, and it even connects directly to YouTube, using the new H.264 codec instead of YouTube's default and inferior Flash codec that the PC-based website uses.
After playing a few videos something interesting happened. The video codec shows very crude artefacts. See the picture below. I haven't found many other iPod users on the web complaining yet, but it's hard to believe I am the only one. Will Apple be able to fix this with a firmware upgrade? If the rumoured Samsung chip at the heart of this device uses a hard-wired video coding subsystem, they likely won't be able to fix the issue quickly in software. Instead, they will have to respin the chip and people will have to return their devices and get new ones months later. Chip inventory will have to be trashed. A reset fixed the issue for me, but it has shown up again.
Are you an SOC designer that still uses hard-wired video codecs? Can you risk designing an SOC that requires a silicon respin to resolve issues that could have been solved in software if a programmable approach had been chosen?
November 2, 2007
Crummy pixels on my iPod Touch
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4 comments:
I read about video problems happening to others on the iTouch. Check out http://digg.com/apple/iPod_Touch_screen_problem_Negative_Black_Effect. Jobs would never let this shit happen to audio on the iPod. Just goes to show Apple doesn't get video yet.
Yes, you can take the risk to use hardwired instead of a programmable solution.
In the case of a portable media player the power consumption is more important than flexibility. And because software solutions still use more power, it is worth the risk.
Programmable subsystems come close to the power consumption of hard-wired solutions, even beating, them if you consider the system power used (including access to DRAM). Also, given the many video codecs used on the internet out there, a programmable solution is often the only option to implement a video subsystem that simply plays everything.
In case of Apple I disagree. We've seen that one of the strong points of Apple is that they stick to one standard, let it be there own music standard and h.264. So for them, flexablility is not realy an isue.
And a programmable solution perhaps come close to hardwired, but beating is not yet the case.
I'd like to add one remark, my preference is a programmable solution, but a lot of system makers prefer a hardwired solution.
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