Here some of the more detailed results of the meeting as reported by Inflight Online.

There were three primary reasons for the decision, according to Childers. “First, the MPEG-4-based codecs - MPEG-4 Part 2, Visual; MPEG-4 Part 10, AVC (also known as H.264); VC1; and DivX - are still evolving. Microsoft’s VC1 has been submitted for approval as an open standard, for example, and the tool-sets surrounding all of these codecs are still maturing.”

Second, says Childers, “it is now possible to transcode from one codec to another at relatively low cost. And third, new chips able to decode across multiple encodes are now becoming available. Taken together, these two factors make it much less necessary to fix on a single codec standard.”

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Childers also points out that handheld IFE developers in particular need to have discretion over the choice of codec as they work to optimise the performance of their systems. *********************

“The ability to control the encoding selection is important to a system designer or content manager who is seeking optimum display and system performance, particularly when power consumption limitations are part of the requirements,” he says.