SCIENCE

Fraunhofer IIS has announced in partnership with Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI), the availability of MPEG Surround audio streaming on TI’s popular DSP platform.

Manufacturers of TI-powered consumer electronics devices such as AV receivers will have easy access to the Fraunhofer MPEG Surround decoding software as part of the recently announced TI Network Audio SDK.

With Fraunhofer’s technology, Internet broadcasters and pure play music services will be able to provide an immersive surround audio experience to consumers that will clearly distinguish them from their competitors. MPEG Surround allows the cost-efficient delivery of surround audio at stereo bitrates as low as 64 kbit/s for 5.1-channels. Users can enjoy the streams in the highest quality on surround-enabled devices and stereo equipment made possible with the stereo-compatible nature of the codec.

With the integration of MPEG Surround into TI’s Networked Audio Software Development kit (nSDK), audio consumer electronics manufacturers will be able to bring multichannel streaming products to market with significantly reduced software development effort. The TI nSDK facilitates software development on the DA8x family of networked audio processors. The nSDK includes a comprehensive package of pre-integrated online music services as well as implementations of network interoperability standards, multichannel and stereo codecs, audio post processing, streaming audio over USB and much more.

TI reference design implementations of MPEG Surround Streaming will be demonstrated during CES 2011 at Fraunhofer’s booth, No. 21828.

MPEG Surround is an ISO standard co-developed by Fraunhofer IIS. Software implementations for device manufacturers are available on various embedded platforms. Broadcasters and music service providers can offer their streams efficiently by using Fraunhofer’s encoding and streaming software solutions that are available directly from Fraunhofer or as part of various third party vendor products.