Philips Electronics announced a new high-speed Universal Serial Bus (USB) peripheral device that is fully compliant with the USB Implementers Forum (IF) video-class specifications (Revision 1.1) for point-to-point video streaming.

The new device provides a dedicated connection to a system's codec, which enables audio/video streaming via USB with a minimal burden on system hardware and software. The company believes that the device will help consumer electronic and computer peripheral manufacturers to implement high-quality streaming video in their products. The new, high-speed device is designed for camcorders, portable media players, TV tuners and set-top boxes.

"USB video-class support will be a standard feature of the Microsoft Windows operating system, which eliminates the need for an additional software driver for a product using our solutions," said Paul Marino, vice president and general manager of Connectivity, Philips Semiconductors. "The small form factor and low-power characteristics make this the ideal device for portable on-the-go entertainment products."

The new high-speed device (ISP1585) is fully compliant with the USB Specification revision 2.0, supporting data transfer rates of up to 480 Mbit/s. It supports a MPEG-2 transport stream, which carries MPEG-2 or MPEG4, and DV, the most commonly used video streaming standards today.

Availability
Philips' new USB peripheral device (ISP1585) will be sampled to select customers in Q3 2005 with general availability in Q2 2006.