Broadcast International is looking to redefine the way audio and video is compressed with CodecSys, a new compression method that uses the best qualities of multiple coder/decoders to shrink the size of multimedia files, reducing storage requirement and delivery bandwidth while maintaining quality.

Codecs such as those from Microsoft (Windows Media) and RealNetworks handle every frame or scene of video with the same compression algorithm. CodecSys analyzes each frame/scene to determine which codec is best suited to compress it. Three consecutive frames of video might use three different compression techniques. Instead of the corporate training video being all MPEG-2, it might consist of five different codecs. Audio can be handled in a similar fashion with different codecs handling voice and music.

Broadcast International says its compression is 10 times better than that of MPEG-2, the standard used in DVDs and television. This translates to a 2-hour full-screen movie being stored on a 256M-byte memory stick rather a 5G-byte DVD disc, Rod Tiede, president and CEO of Broadcast International, says. He also says CodecSys can deliver high-definition television at 4M byte/sec instead of the 19.2M byte/sec used in today's broadcasts.

"Whatever approach you use to deal with digital images, there will always be some trade-off," says Adi Kishore, media and entertainment analyst at The Yankee Group. "By using this approach, they have the best of many worlds."

Broadcast International uses a proprietary software player to decode and display content encoded with CodecSys, but plans to develop it into a plug-in for a mainstream media client such as Windows Media Player so potential users do not have to install and learn yet another application. Tiede also says the company is working on getting the CodecSys decoder embedded into a digital signal processing chip for use in cable boxes, satellite receivers and cell phones where processing power is at a premium.

At next month's National Association of Broadcasters show, Broadcast International is scheduled to demonstrate CodecSys in a $3,000 set-top videoconferencing appliance called Interactive Video. Tiede says the device, which runs on Linux and is H.323 compatible, can deliver full-screen TV video at 100K bit/sec, about one-third the bandwidth that traditional video endpoints use. The 100K bit/sec works only between two Interactive Video endpoints, not any H.323 device.