The Fraunhofer IIS AAC Family – Ideal for MPEG DASH based Adaptive Streaming

At NAB, Fraunhofer IIS will demonstrate the benefits of its HE-AAC Multichannel and MPEG Surround Audio Codecs for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming

LAS VEGAS – April 16, 2012 (Booth # SU6212) – Fraunhofer IIS, the world’s renowned source for audio and multimedia technologies, played a major role in the development of the ISO MPEG DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) standard ratified in November 2011.

At NAB, Fraunhofer IIS will demonstrate how the HE-AAC Multichannel and MPEG Surround codecs can be used to enable the best possible DASH streaming experience from bit rates as low as 48 kbit/s for 5.1 audio with MPEG Surround up to transparency with AAC-LC at 320 kbit/s. Fraunhofer’s codecs allow service providers to enable the best possible consumer experience by combining highest coding efficiency with the dynamic ability to change audio bitrates in order to adapt to changing network conditions as consumers stream content to their variety of devices.

Fraunhofer IIS’ Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) family is the universal solution for streaming and broadcasting, with a presence in over 5 billion devices. Leading HTML5 web browsers such as Apple® Safari®, Microsoft® Internet Explorer 9® and Google® Chrome® support HE-AAC Multichannel decoding natively. MPEG DASH and the growing Internet Streaming landscape will benefit from AAC’s ubiquity, audio switching capabilities, full metadata support and continuous innovation.

“Fraunhofer IIS has been actively involved in the development and standardization of MPEG DASH from the beginning,” says Harald Popp, head of the Multimedia Realtime Systems department at Fraunhofer IIS. “Our AAC family of audio codecs natively complements the MPEG ecosystem of H.264 video, MP4 file format and MPEG DASH transport. ”

Fraunhofer is a member of the DASH Promoters Group, a consortium of industry leaders who promote the new adaptive streaming standard.

For more information, visit http://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 19,000 employees worldwide, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is composed of 60 Institutes conducting research in a broad range of research areas.

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