The essential building blocks for 4K and higher resolution video delivery to the home are being put in place, reports Adrian Pennington
ALTHOUGH BROADCASTERShave barely settled their investments in HD production and transmission equipment and only a few are contemplating broadcasts at Full HD 1080p, the next leap in broadcasting specs is coming. Earlier this year the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (a body comprised of MPEG and ITU teams) finalised a draft for the H.265 codec, aka High Efficiency Video Coding or HEVC, as the successor to H.264 MPEG4 AVC. The aim is to improve coding
efficiency by at least twice that of AVC. On the one hand this will benefit streaming technologies, notably to boost the quality and efficiency of online video services. It will also pave the way for two UltraHDTV systems: at 4K (3840 pixels wide by 2160 high) and 8K (7680×4320). “UHDTV promises to bring
NDS demonstrated HD-to-4K video on a giant living room screen at IBC2011
about one of the greatest changes to audiovisual communications and broadcasting in recent decades,” wrote Christoph Dosch, chairman of the Broadcasting Study Group in ITU News. “Technology is truly on the cusp of transforming how people experience audio-visual communications.” According to David Wood,
Prepare your network for the next generation of media delivery
chair of the ITU working party in the Broadcasting Service Study Group and deputy director of the EBU’s Technology and Development team, “greater compression efficiency means that broadband networks and mobiles that use them can deliver higher quality video before congestion problems set in, or before measures (like MPEG-DASH) must be taken to stream at lower quality because of congestion. Essentially ‘bits are bucks’ and the bit rate gain is what will make HEVC attractive.” Tests have apparently
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revealed gains in excess of 50% but Wood is keen to rein in these expectations. “When interpreting the performance of a compression system, you need to understand that some scene compositions are harder to compress than others,” he says. “Programme content has a range of ‘criticalities’. The 50% estimate might be content of average ‘criticality’. But, if you just look at content which has high criticality, the specific saving will probably be less.” Another way of looking at this, he says, is to relate