The "living room revolution" is changing the very nature of mobile handset requirements, said Eero Kaikkonen, On2 Technologies' executive vice president and'chief'marketing officer.

On2 Technologies is launching Monday (Feb. 11) at the Mobile World Congress here a multi-format configurable hardware decoder. The new RTL decoder, dubbed Hantro 8190, lets mobile phone designers add various video decoding capabilities, including mobile video (H.264; VC-1), Internet video (Adobe Flash used in YouTube), broadcast video (MPEG-2) and video conferencing (H.263).

More specifically, the Hantro 8190 supports H.263, H.264, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VC-1, Sorenson Spark and VP6 video formats, along with up to 16MP JPEG still images.

The Hantro 8190's versatility goes beyond QuickTime and DivX, also able to decode multiple generations of Adobe Flash video -- used by such popular websites as YouTube and Facebook. Further, Hantro 8190 has added support for MPEG-2 " often used in broadcast video and DVD.

The idea is to "bring the separate worlds of mobile, broadcast and Internet video close together", said Kaikkonen.

Indeed, On2 who developed its proprietary VP6 and VP7 codecs, finds itself well-position to pull off the convergence.

VP6 and VP7 have been embraced by Adobe, and used in several generations of its Flash Player. On2 has combined its knowledge in VP6 and VP7 with a host of standards-based video expertise and a Hantro RTL core from Hantro -- a Finnish video compression specialist "- On2 acquired last year.

Until now, very few mobile handsets could play back Adobe Flash video.

Unlike the PC platform dictated by Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system, mobile platforms have been traditionally fragmented since various handset vendors rely on their own proprietary software and hardware platforms. "That's the crux of the issue," said Kaikkonen. Software such as Adobe Flash players, if needed to be pre-installed in a handset, would have had to be rewritten to every mobile platform.

On2 is leveraging the company's experience in developing VP6 and "transcoding" its video to bring Adobe Flash video to handsets.

The Hantro 8190 design is capable of decoding H.264 format high profile, 1080p resolution video at 30fps using a clock frequency under 165MHz. Silicon area can be optimized for unique applications by selecting only the formats and screen resolutions required. Handset chip designers can now integrate a single RTL product that adds multi-format video capabilities to ARM, MIPS and other silicon cores, according to On2.

On2's Hantro hardware RTL decoders are already inside dozens of mobile chipset designs and commercially-deployed end user devices. The company claims that they have been widely cross-tested for interoperability with hundreds of video encoders.

The Hantro 8190 is now available for licensing from On2. The product comes complete with RTL source code for VHDL or Verilog, RTL test bench and test data, ANSI C driver source code and complete technical documentation.