And the winner is: ATEME's H.264.

PARIS, France -- ATEME (www.ateme.com), a leading provider of hardware and software solutions for audio and video compression on DSP, PC and FPGA, participated in MPEGIF's MPEG-4 AVC interoperability tests.

MPEGIF (www.m4if.org), is a world-famous organization created to promote MPEG standards and ensure their interoperability.

ATEME is a member of MPEGIF since 2004 and has participated in the latest round of interoperability tests for ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC (also known under the name ITU-T H.264) organized by MPEGIF.

This new round of interoperability tests verified mutual encoder and decoder product interoperability among international leaders in video compression. This work aimed at being sure MPEGIF member products are indeed interoperable, thereby increasing product confidence on the market.

ATEME participated with its Baseline and Main Profile H.264 encoder and decoder. ATEME provided 16 Main Profile encoded streams to be decoder by the test attendees (30 companies).

ATEME decoded all of the encoded streams provided by the attending companies thus proving the high interoperability level of its H.264 encoder and decoder products.

Those results have confirmed the interoperability of our H.264, already established by previous tests realized by several customers.

Those positive results have been strengthen by independent testing results (to be published soon - ask us for preliminary report) that attest ATEME's H.264 is the best codec available today on the market.

Another recent study handled by Doom9 (www.doom9.org) about comparative testing has been realized during December 2004. It included top 10 competitors submitting various video compression standards. Once more, ATEME two participating encoders have been recognized as top quality products:

--The only competitor that offers no smearing trouble when bright text appears on dark areas;

--It exhibits the greatest amount of details, when other encoders often blur small details;

--It processes real-time encoding with a good quality;

--Bitrate regulation is very good;

--It supports AR signaling;

--It does not engenders color bleeding issue;

--According to people who carried out the comparison: "it's the best codec I've tested".

To be noticed, H.264 High Profile has just been ratified in November 2004. ATEME thus is the first and unique company to release a H.264 High Profile encoder, stressed doom9 in its conclusion report.

ATEME will showcase its H.264 solutions during NAB show 2005, 18-21 April, Las Vegas, NV (booth SL3922).

About ATEME: ATEME, headquartered in France (www.ateme.com), is a world-leading provider of hardware and software systems for audio and video compression on DSP. ATEME delivers custom services on top of its development boards and algorithms. Since 2002, ATEME focuses on applicative market-oriented reference designs which target video- security, broadband and multimedia domains. The result for OEMs is a faster product design, a shorter time-to-market and overall costs reduction. ATEME operates worldwide thanks to its distribution network in Europe, Asia and North America.