Hardware JPEG compression

Does anyone have any experience with harware data compression.
I have a PAL signal that i need to sample (roughly once every 2 seconds) and convert to a compressed image.
1.) Is JPEG the easiest format for me to use?
2.) Can I buy a chip "Off the Shelf" that will do this? If so what and where?

This needs to be done remotely so i cant use a PC...
Any help would be most helpful as I'm reasonably new to this area.

Thanks for help with my previous posts by the way, solved one of my problems!

Cheers in advance Chris.

Hardware JPEG

Chips that did baseline JPEG in hardware were reasonably popular during the early 90's. I did several designs back then based on the C-Cubed CL550, the Zoran 36020/40, and the LS647xx series from LSI. The advantage of using dedicated hardware was speed, they were at least an order of magnitude faster than DSP-based solutions at the time. I doubt that any of these chips are still available or supported, but here's a link to a few more dedicated JPEG chips (DCT processors & back end encoders) if you want to try tracking them down:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/compression-faq/part3/

Very few of these were all in one JPEG chips (CL550 and ZR36040 being the exceptions). Most came as chipsets, with a DCT codec and a separate back end for zig-zag/quantization & huffman coding. Most chipsets also had an optional front end chip for doing color space conversions.

If you have a second or more for processing, consider using a DSP-based solution, it's much more flexible and can be updated easily :wink:. Well, easier (ex; going from DCT to wavelet compression). Highly optimized baseline JPEG code exists for a number of DSPs, especially those from TI.