Majesco, developer of Nintendo's Game Boy Advance Video, announced it has filed five patents for compression technologies related to the creation and playback of video for handheld devices.
"Majesco's proprietary technologies allow for full 'DVD-like' control of the video," said Jesse Sutton, CEO of Majesco. "Consumers have grown accustomed to the rich features on DVDs such as fast-forward, rewind, animated chapter menus and instant chapter skip. Our technology brings that same set of features to small handheld devices that use ROM cartridges instead of optical disks."
The first videos are scheduled to release this spring by several major retail partners. Majesco predits initial orders could surpass one million units.
"The real benefit of this technology is its extraordinary compression capabilities," said Kevin Ray, Chief Technology Officer of Majesco. "We're taking 45 minutes of video - which is around 2,500 megabytes uncompressed - and we're squeezing that into a container that can hold 32 megabytes."
Majesco is expected to showcase the videos and video technology at the upcoming 2004 Electronic Entertainment Expo.