Toshiba is going to start mass producing MPEG-4 chips for mobile phones in September.

These will allow users of phones, equipped with built-in cameras, to send, receive and watch video on them.

The Toshiba chips will combine an MPEG-4 encoder and decoder, a speech encoder and decoder, an audio and video multiplexer and 12Mb of DRAM which the company reckons will double a phones battery life.

Video conferencers or video messagers should see images of 144 by 176 pixels running at 15 frames per second.

Samples will start shipping in late April. ®