Barco Silex's JPEG 2000 high frame rate decoder powers USL's Integrated Media Block (IMB)

Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium – 3 October 2012 – Barco Silex, Barco's center of competence for embedded video coding and electronic design, announces the successful integration of its high frame rate JPEG 2000 decoder core within the DCI certified IMB developed by USL for 3D and 4K digital cinema applications.

"We are very pleased to announce this new important step in our long term collaboration with USL for the development of their Mediablock products. We congratulate Jack and his team at USL on achieving DCI certification on their IMB" said Thierry Watteyne, CEO of Barco Silex. "Our high performance JPEG2000 decoder core together with extensive FPGA design services on integrating watermarking and optimized video pipe support, have greatly contributed to the achievement of a DCI compliant IMB solution supporting both 4K 30fps and high frame rates 2K 3D up to 60 fps per eye."

The flexible JPEG 2000 IP cores from Barco Silex are very well suited for digital cinema applications and formats. The DCI version of the decoder supports high frame rates up to 120 fps in 2K and 48 fps in 4K at high bit-rates, and also fully integrates with the industry’s watermarking solutions.

Barco Silex offers the most flexible and comprehensive JPEG 2000 solutions on FGPA for broadcast and digital cinema applications. The support for the latest 28nm FPGA devices fits in the continuity of Barco Silex commitment to providing the industry with efficient and reliable solutions for JPEG 2000 while meeting the ever evolving constraints of cost and time-to-market.

The USL state of the art mediablock supports all of the current 2K and 4K movie formats plus the upcoming high frame rate formats planned for “The Hobbit” and “Avatar 2”. It provides all the built in support for security, forensic marking, 3D and subtitling.

“We selected the Barco Silex group because of their vast experience with JPEG2000 in the broadcast post-production area.  Their expertise in high end video imaging is the best in the world. In addition to the Silex JPEG2000 decoder their design services team was instrumental in development of many core components of the final product” said Jack Cashin, President, USL Inc.

For any questions or updated technical information about Barco Silex' offering on the new FPGA devices, please visit Barco Silex website (www.barco-silex.com) or contact us at barco-silex@barco.com.

About Barco Silex

Barco Silex is a leader in contract engineering services, custom hardware and software development, as well as Intellectual Property (IP). Thanks to its continued stream of aggressive innovations, Barco Silex stays ahead of the competition. Barco Silex’s history as a custom electronic design house (ASIC, FPGA, DSP, Board) specialized in video coding, cryptography, security and memory controllers goes back to 1991, offering the best guarantee for continuous support throughout the complete lifecycle of products.

About Barco

Barco, a global technology company, designs and develops visualization products for a variety of selected professional markets. Barco has its own facilities for Sales & Marketing, Customer Support, R&D and Manufacturing in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. Barco (NYSE Euronext Brussels: BAR) is active in more than 90 countries with more than 3,700 employees worldwide. Barco posted sales of 1.041 billion euro in 2011.

About USL

USL is a leader in the cinema industry with a 30 year history of producing advanced audio and video processing products for cinema.   The company has won two technical achievement awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in both sound and picture.  USL also has been voted the manufacturer of the year five times by the International Cinema Technology Association.