Fraunhofer IIS Presents 5.1 Surround Streaming with HE-aaC on android 4.1 at IBC

Native HE-aaC multichannel support enables streaming service providers and broadcasters to offer high-quality surround audio to the home theater through android phones and tablets

Amsterdam (06 Sep 2012)

 

Fraunhofer IIS, the world’s renowned source for audio and multimedia technologies, demonstrates at IBC the native support of High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) multichannel in Android 4.1. This support enables playback of high-quality 5.1 surround content on Android 4.1 phones and tablets connected via HDMI to a home theatre system. In combination with adaptive HTTP streaming technologies such as MPEG DASH, Android devices become true delivery platforms allowing service providers to easily offer their content in the most efficient, highest-quality MPEG standards available today.

“With the inclusion of HE-AAC multichannel in Android 4.1, users will be able to enjoy full surround sound with content delivered to Android phones and tablets as easily as they have with BluRay or DVD titles. Connecting a HDMI cable from their existing audio/video receiver or TV set to the MHL or HDMI connector on Android devices will deliver foolproof surround audio and video”, says Robert Bleidt, division general manager at Fraunhofer USA Digital Media Technologies.

HE-AAC multichannel is part of the new Fraunhofer FDK AAC codec library for Android. This software, included in Android since version 4.1, makes open source Fraunhofer implementations of the MPEG audio codecs AAC, HE-AAC, HE-AACv2, and AAC-ELD available to the Android community.

HE-AAC is today’s most efficient high-quality audio codec used in TV, radio, and streaming services worldwide. The codec is integrated into most operating systems, streaming platforms and consumer electronics devices. In addition to its unique coding efficiency, HE-AAC has the dynamic ability to change audio bit-rates in order to adapt to changing network conditions as consumers stream content to a variety of devices. Consequently, HE-AAC will also be used in applications based on the new adaptive HTTP streaming standard MPEG DASH.

Fraunhofer is also demonstrating at its IBC booth 8.B80 how HE-AAC enables the best possible DASH streaming experience from bit-rates as low as 24 kbit/s for bandwidth- limited stereo operations to 160 kbit/s and more for high quality surround audio.

For more information, visit www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm. 

 

About Fraunhofer

The Fraunhofer IIS Audio and Multimedia division, based in Erlangen, Germany, has been working in compressed audio technology for more than 20 years and remains a leading innovator of technologies for cutting-edge multimedia systems. Fraunhofer IIS is universally credited with the development of mp3 and co-development of AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) as well as technologies for the media world of tomorrow, including MPEG Surround and the Fraunhofer Audio Communication Engine.

Through the course of more than two decades, Fraunhofer IIS has licensed its audio codec software and application-specific customizations to at least 1,000 companies. Fraunhofer estimates that it has enabled more than 5 billion commercial products worldwide using its mp3, AAC and other media technologies.

The Fraunhofer IIS organization is part of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, based in Munich, Germany. Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is Europe’s largest applied research organization and is partly funded by the German government. With 20,000 employees worldwide, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is composed of 60 Institutes conducting research in a broad range of research areas. For more information, contact Matthias Rose, matthias.rose@ iis.fraunhofer.de, or visit www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm.