New chip compresses/decompress up to 1920x1080-line high-definition video in real time.

Japanese electronics firm Fujitsu today announced the release of what it believes is the industry’s first single-chip video processor capable of handling true high-definition H.264 video in real time.

H.264 is the latest high-performance video compressor/decompress or “codec” that offers high-quality video with comparatively little data. It is used by Apple on its video-capable iPods and is part of the video standards for both HD DVD and Blu-ray movie disc formats.

Fujitsu sees typical applications for the chip coming from digital video recorders and high-definition camcorders.

The chip, designated MB86H51, supports the high-quality H.264 High Profile 4.0 format and is an up-rated version of the MB86H50 that currently supports H.264 compression and decompression at 1440x1080-line resolution.

The new chip is also backward compatible with other HD-specification video formats including 1440x1080-line, 1280x720-line, 720x480-line and 720x576-line video formats with a maximum bit rate of 20Mbps. Both NTSC and PAL standards are also supported.

While the chip handles audio compression as part of the data stream, it only supports two-channel stereo. Audio format support includes uncompressed Linear PCM, and the compressed audio formats MPEG-1 Layer 2 (MP2), MPEG2-AAC and Dolby Digital AC3. The chip is designed also for HDTV decoding given it support for MPEG2-TS (transport system) data streams.

The MB86H51 uses proprietary Fujitsu algorithms to automatically adjust how and where compression is used, using less where it is more noticed in an image and vice versa.

Power consumption is expected to be approximately 750mW running at 1.2-volts when encoding full 1920x1080-line video.

Fujitsu expects to sell five million just before April 2008 and sample chips are expected to be available on July 1, 2007.