Oregan Networks Ltd., a provider of IP media delivery software building blocks, and Sigma Designs Inc., a leader of digital media processing for consumer devices, announced availability of a multimedia reference design, based on the EM8620L, the first chip in the Sigma Designs' family of high-resolution video streaming silicon for digital, home entertainment devices.

Mark G. Perry, Oregan Networks' CEO, said, "The industry leading EM8620L chipset is now integrated with Oregan's software to provide PC levels of web browsing and user interface delivery on TV, along with video and audio on demand functionalities. The combination of a powerful media processor core, rich functionalities and compliance with industry interoperability standards, such as UPnP ® Forum, Intel® Networked Media Product Requirements, World Wide Web Consortium standards and Digital Living Network Alliance guidelines, provides manufacturers with the best-of-breed package for a variety of connected device form factors."

The partners are engaged with several leading global manufacturers of IP set-top boxes, network DVD players and digital media adaptors, and anticipate a number of mutual customer announcements over the coming months followed by volume shipments.

Software Enabling New Level of Convergence
The reference design combines the functionalities of multicast IP-based television (IPTV) and video on demand (VOD), with DVD playback, USB 2.0 and multi-format memory card access, as well as digital media adaptor features. The streaming media client, a unified device and media control user interface are provided by Oregan Networks. Oregan Media Browser, an embedded media access application, enables IP streaming of premium broadband entertainment content and Internet media directly to the device, obviating dependency on the PC as a transitory media storage medium in the digital home ecosystem.

The core of Oregan's solution is its W3C recommendations-compliant TV browser and UI engine, enabling advanced web browsing and graphics rendering on resource constrained TV-centric entertainment systems, featuring Dynamic HTML (DHTML) and Macromedia ® Flash ® 6 content support.

In addition to the core functionalities of the browser, an integrated UPnP AV device and content discovery technologies, facilitate streaming of personal media, such as photos and home videos, as well as downloaded music and movies -- from a standard Windows XP PC.

The Chipset
EM8620L began shipping in April 2004 and has since become the most popular consumer platform for supporting Windows Media Video decoding. The platform offers advanced specifications in all vital aspects of chipset architecture contributing to the quality of the end user experience: high-definition video rendering, featuring up to 720p resolution, and comprehensive media codec support, including MPEG -1, -2, -4, DivX, Windows Media Video 9, Windows Media Audio 9, Windows Media Audio 9 Pro, as well as current Microsoft DRM technologies.

In addition, Sigma has recently enabled support for Microsoft's PlaysForSure program.

The core of the chipset solution is the industry patented Sigma HD technology, embedded within the chip's video processing engines. The platform incorporates PCI-bus, IDE controller and additional peripheral ports for networking and audio encode components.

"The market for connected devices is growing rapidly, spurred by the availability of digital entertainment content and advanced encryption technologies," said Ken Lowe, vice president of Strategic Marketing for Sigma Designs. "Our mission is to enable the use of advanced compression formats for delivering high-quality video and audio data over bandwidth limited networks. Sigma Designs and Oregan Networks are committed players in the digital home convergence market, striving to deliver uncompromised quality for the consumer experience, and the set of features that fulfil real market requirements."