San Jose, California-based Compression Labs Inc is shipping its implementation of the H.261 videoconferencing standard as a feature on its Rembrandt II/VP video codec family, alongside Compression’s own proprietary algorithm, making it compatible with H.261, Compression’s low-bandwidth CTX mode, near broadcast quality CTX Plus mode, or Rembrandt mode. The company claims its implementation of H.261 is superior to the standard, with its own pre- and post-processing methods. Also, it uses a high-performance motion compensation implementation of the standard, providing up to 30 frames per second of motion video. H.261 has been implemented across the entire 56Kbps to 2.048Mbps videoconferencing bandwidth spectrum, covering the full range of applications and the product has a range of interfaces to support different network requirements. The product has been through international field trials and interoperability tests with other videoconferencing vendors via Sprint and AT&T. It has also begun testing for network certification in Sprint’s video lab. Compression Labs will supply users with a vendor and country interoperability status report, and the company is to continue its work in defining the H.261 standard. Issues to be addressed include low-bit rate audio, multipoint links, graphics handling and encryption. Compression Labs is providing the H.261 implementation at no extra cost to Rembrandt II/VP customers.
