IDT HQV Matchbox

CES 2011

By Scott Wilkinson • Posted: Jan 9, 2010

As you may already know, the intellectual property rights for HQV video processing were purchased by IDT some time ago, and the company has been working on new chips since then. I've seen demos of prototypes a couple of times, but I was under NDA (non-disclosure agreement) until now. I can finally talk about the HQV Vida chip, which will soon be available in AVRs, Blu-ray players, and video processors.

Among the first such products is the little gem pictured here, tentatively called the HQV Matchbox. Not much bigger than an actual matchbox, it has an HDMI in and out as well as a USB port, and it can be powered via HDMI if the source device provides that capability. This surprisingly versatile little box provides deinterlacing and scaling, noise reduction, resolution enhancement, skin-tone enhancement, and a function called StreamClean, which cleans up low-res video such as YouTube, all controllable from the included remote. I've seen demos of all these functions, and they are very impressive. The HQV Matchbox might be marketed directly by IDT, or it could licensed to be manufactured and marketed by another company. Availability is unknown at this point, but the target price is under $100.

Comments

Submitted by Hazmat Si on March 14, 2010 - 1:02am.

If you have a projector or plasma, receiver, and blue ray player that all have various resources to upconvert SV to HD, how will they all work together? What if the blueray player has HQV Vida and the receiver and plasma have the same technology. Will they cancel each other out or make things worse or better? My concern: too many upconverters can make a mess. A small device like this box would be a great answer if it does not interfere with other upconverting hardware.

Submitted by Stradbucks on June 10, 2010 - 9:31am.

Exabyte, leave out the abusive insults. We all know what he meant and his point was interesting! Upconverting, downconverting and cross converting generally introduce artifacts that can affect spatial frequency response or even introduce aliasing in the picture. The ideal is to undergo only one stage of processing involving image re-sizing and that is not obvious when connecting players to displays that all have their own processing stages.