Polycom announced its support for H.264 High Profile on the RPX, TPX, ATX, its new OTX suite and on its RMX 4000 and RMX 2000 bridges.

[[H.264]] is an international standard for video image compression, now widely used in high definition and telepresence video conferencing products and services. The standard is utilized across a broad array of applications such as surveillance, broadcast, communications, storage, entertainment, gaming and computing. 17 sets of capabilities are defined in the standard targeting specific classes of applications, five of which are accounted for as part of the [[Scalable Video Coding]] extension.

High Profile is one of the 2D, non-scalable profiles. It is optimized for broadcast and video storage applications by leveraging the [[Context-Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding]] (CABAC), a sophisticated algorithm more efficient in encoding than the Baseline Profile method, but also more processor-intensive than the less efficient and less processor-intensive algorithms used in the Baseline Profile. The High Profile standard method also allows adaptive transforms that compress the corners of the image greater than the center of the image (where the people are), for further bandwidth reductions.

Polycom’s deepening support for this standard signals the maturity of the technology. Clearly, the company hopes to make operational economics a big issue for customers expanding their telepresence and video conferencing networks, something that will certainly precede the much anticipated economic recovery. They claim that users can get the same visual performance with half the bandwidth, particularly in high capacity systems. Here’s the link to the High Profile Calculator.