June 2013
www.tvbeurope.com
The new HEVC standard is promised to deliver up to 50% bitrate savings compared to H.264 for HD
promising efficiencies at those frame sizes. Once Ultra-HD content and playback devices reach a critical mass, HEVC will be the way to deliver such experience,” adds Nikos Kyriopoulos, product director, Media Excel.
Power hungry The added complexity of HEVC requires 10 times the power required for H.264. Even following Moore’s Law, “CPU or GPU performance will take about three-and-a-half years to increase performance by 10-fold and thus making HEVC software-based solutions as ‘CPU economical’ as H.264 ones today,” says Maag. “Some of the techniques in
HEVC are not new; they’ve been waiting for the computers to get fast enough,” adds Grab. As the code is optimised and specialised hardware is introduced, the level of compression can be increased. “HEVC introduces an order-
of-magnitude level of complexity in comparison to AVC/H.264. This complexity is mainly attributed to: the four-fold extension of the directional intra-prediction modes (33 vs 8); and the Coding Tree Units/Block feature,” says Kyriopoulos. This will adversely affect
realtime HEVC production until more economical hardware-based or hardware-accelerated solutions are available. “In the meantime, offline content encoding for multiple redistribution will be better positioned to take advantage of the bandwidth savings without having to have the 10-fold increase in performance needed to sustain realtime production,” he adds. Fouchard sees “very little to gain for production environments to move to HEVC
too quickly. At first it should remain a standard used only for the final broadcasting to viewers; and then for contribution applications where the input is uncompressed and the output from the receiver also
uncompressed, feeding into the production environment.” For realtime use, Kyriopoulos
believes that rather than simply throwing processing power at it, it is better to optimise the encoder implementation to
TVBEurope 47 News & Analysis
utilise the most appropriate encoding features/modes without having to try them all in advance and within a realistic CPU cycle range. “For 4K contribution, H.264 is still expected to be the codec
of choice at least initially, especially over DVB-ASI/ Teleport-based networks where H.264 is ubiquitous (fully supports 4:2:2 sampling, etc.). This applies to distribution scenarios as well, as long as
Nikos Kyriopoulos: “Once Ultra-HD content and playback devices reach a critical mass, HEVC will be the way to deliver such experience”
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