Obviously, the feature popular in smartphones and tablets is the video. Indeed, many recent chips support 1080p H.264 "High Profile" and use this compatibility as a selling point. Let us explain.

In the ARM chips used in smartphones, the processors are generally unable to play videos encoded in H.264 in high definition - based models of Cortex A9 can barely read the 720p - and SoC (all-in chip -a), therefore, often include a component dedicated to decompress (and sometimes encoding) the video. And these chips, unfortunately, have limitations. If decoding software can accept any standard - only the processor account - the dedicated chips have hardware features that only accept the standards defined at the outset.

The "high profile"

Take for example the NVIDIA Tegra: If the chip is able to decode 1080p H.264, the decoder is limited to the "main profile" with a maximum throughput of 20 megabits / s. In fact, it's too low, a lot of videos (commercial or not) use the "high profile" (more complex) and work with higher flow rates. 3 with Tegra, NVIDIA has changed the decoder chip: the "high profile" is now supported and speeds of up to 40 megabits / s. NVIDIA is not the only company to offer this support, which becomes a marketing tool: the OMAP4 and Texas Instruments - novelty - the ZMS-20 of ZiiLABS also support the "high profile"

Note one last problem: if the chips can easily decode the stream, they must still be used. Indeed, all the programs do not use hardware decoding and some operating systems, such as IOS does not give access to third-party applications with hardware decoding, then forced to decode the videos on the processor.

In the future, smartphones and tablets should gradually replace the Media Center boxes, the HDMI standard becomes a (sometimes optional), and wireless capabilities are becoming more popular.