48 TVBEurope News & Analysis
www.tvbeurope.com June 2013
Mike Gannon: “Production is beginning to move to 4K, so the next challenge is distribution”
the use-case justifies the elevated transport costs,” says Kyriopoulos.
“One other aspect that also
makes good sense, in sports specifically, is the utilisation of the 4K frame as a canvas where HD frames are produced from. Essentially, allowing for 4K contribution content to be cropped (zoomed where the action/ball is) into a high definition frame for delivery with AVC/H.264 compression.” “HEVC also has a lot of
promise as an editing codec for 4K — for example, it supports many more motion search directions for intra-frame encoding. This bodes well for people who are looking for a 4K replacement for AVC-Intra,” says Pallett.
“The compelling reason for
production environments to move away from the editable codecs currently used would be if 4K mandates new colour coding practices that the current codecs of the production environments do not support. For instance MPEG-2 does not support 10-bit, which may become a must for colour- coding in 4K,” says Fouchard.
MPEG-4 not dead yet HEVC won’t mean the abandonment of existing codecs. “As with MPEG-2, there is still room for improvement on H.264. These standards have too much market traction to stand still,” says Harmonic’s senior director Emerging Technology & Strategy, Ian Trow. However, “the degree to which compression improvements can be achieved is undoubtedly slowing, hence the introduction of successor standards.”
“We continue to do more with H.264 and MPEG-2,” says Murra. “We launched a new encoder, AVP4000, that brings the highest performance we’ve
Elemental is still even optimising MPEG-2 based on what it has learned from its work on H.264 and HEVC, while Envivio uses a common
Keith Wymbs: “HEVC shrinks bitrates required for 4K resolution potentially to under 10Mbps making UHD more accessible”
core architecture and algorithms). The gain in MPEG-2 are as, if not more, important as what you could get with HEVC,” says Felts.
“HEVC also has a lot of promise as an editing codec for 4K — for example, it supports many more motion search directions for intra-frame encoding. This bodes well for people who are looking for a 4K replacement for AVC-Intra”John Pallet, Telestream
ever had in MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, primarily due to new work with algorithms.” Compared to Ericsson’s previous generation it can produce 10-20% better efficiency, with the right content, “Operators can not sit still waiting for HEVC, so they have to maximise the infrastructure they have in place today.” AVP users will be able to
upgrade to HEVC as well, but as the interfaces and bandwidth requirements are not decided yet, that will have an effect on how these will be added to particular models. ATEME’s next generation
firmware upgrade for its hardware encoding core, for MPEG-4, will show “striking efficiency gains” that “will be visible in the very low latency modes. In fact this new core will allow us to operate at end-to-end latencies below 250ms with practically no loss in compression efficiency against our high quality modes (today there is a more perceptible trade off between low latency and compression efficiency),” explains Fouchard.
architecture across all codecs. “Any improvement brought to one of them has benefits to the others (MPEG-2, AVC, and HEVC are based on the same
Thomson’s latest ViBE EM4000 H.264 multi-channel broadcast encoder fits one more channel onto a DVB-S2 transponder (from six HD
channels to seven) with the same video quality compared to its previous generation. “Over the next 12-15 months, we expect to improve the H.264 efficiency of our ViBE EM4000 encoder by adding a second channel in a DVB-S2 transponder, so eight HD channels. Around a 15% improvement,” said Gallier. An x264 H.264 encoder, such as
those available from Telestream, “can cut bit rate requirements in half compared with other encoders,” says Pallett. “This same differentiation will be present in HEVC encoding. Our belief is that without an exceptional HEVC encoder, the promise on bitrate will not be realised (you will get the same bit rate out of a substandard HEVC encoder as a great H.264 encoder).”
H.264’s place in the 4K era By David Fox
Eutelsat is using H.264 to
“THERE ARE recent camera ingest formats for 4K based upon H.264,” such as XAVC, says Pallett. “However, in the longer term the encoding practices in HEVC make it a significantly better option for 4K material (larger motion search radius, larger coding units to name two key differences). Quality with 4K H.264 will not be great at distribution bit rates and ultimately this is where HEVC will be a clear winner.” However, one barrier to
HEVC is that licensing fees are not established yet. “The license costs will drive the adoption (or not) of HEVC for distribution,” says Felts.
deliver Ultra HD over satellite. “As soon as there is an HEVC implementation (live or file) for Ultra HD and we are close — at least for file — we could imagine that H.264 will disappear from the picture, decoders being the real bottleneck here, rather than the encoder itself,” says Gallier. This will be driven by the time to market. “There is all the technology required to do 4K in AVC today. With HEVC, this will depend on the availability of the decoders,” adds Felts.
Ericsson is working on trials with the EBU and KT Skylife in Korea to transmit/ contribute Ultra HD using H.264 “One of the main drivers [for Ultra HD] will be
sporting events. AVC already allows this and has the 4:2:2 progressive 10-bit formats necessary,” says Murra. Ericsson has adapted its Simulsync technology, developed for 3D, to synch the four HD quadrants of the picture together to transmit Ultra HD. Digital Rapids believes that H.264 will still have a use for 4K, at least initially. “While the additional bandwidth H.264 will require versus HEVC for 4K content may be prohibitive for linear Ultra HD television, for other applications such as home theatre it can still be viable — much like MPEG-2 continued to be viable for Blu-ray titles even though Blu-ray supported H.264,” says Nann.
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