28 TVBEurope IBC Wrap-Up
Highly efficient video
HEVC WILL require new chips in set-top boxes, so while it will be relatively easy to implement in software on the latest mobiles and computers, or to implement in the contribution chain, it might take a few years before broadcasters can depend on it for transmission. However, there is an alternative that can deliver the same 50% cut in bitrate without any changes on the receiving end. Beamr Video is “a perceptual quality filter that is highly correlated with human vision,” so it can “eliminate all the redundancies in video that are beyond human vision,” explained Beamr president Eli Lubitch. “This quality filter is attached to standard encoders in such a way that we guide the coder to frame by frame reduce the bitrate to the lowest possible rate. We take out all the differences between the human spectrum and the CMOS sensor spectrum.” At IBC it showed 6Mbps and 3Mbps versions of a 1080p movie side by side with no noticeable difference between them.
Users can either deliver better quality at the same target bitrate, or offer identical quality with significant file savings, giving better delivery on mobiles or broadband and reducing mobile data bills. “It will preserve all the settings
and profiles, so for the clients it is transparent. You don’t need any special software in the receiving card,” he explained. “This will allow you to do 4K with standard H.264 with the same bandwidth as H.265, so it’s a way of delivering 4K now instead of waiting two years.” If you do move to HEVC, Beamr can be used with it too. “If someone has gained 50% efficiency by going to H.265, they could gain another 50% by using Beamr. We are incremental,” he claimed. Beamr Video is now available for an annual licence fee and has been the subject of 44 different patents and patent applications.
Eli Lubitch: Beamr Video “will allow you to do 4K with standard H.264 with the same bandwidth as H.265”
Low bitrates Contribution is one area where HEVC could make an impact fairly quickly. LiveWire Digital showed a comparison at IBC of HEVC and H.264 at just 1Mbps. “You don’t get an acceptable picture with H.264, but it is acceptable with HEVC,” said Richard Aylmer-Hall, business development manager. There were parts of the picture in HEVC at 1Mbps that didn’t match what H.264 could do at 2Mbps, but overall the quality was about the same at half the bitrate, with HEVC offering more accurate colour. “We’ve been working hard to optimise our implementation of HEVC and will be launching an update to our file-based contribution tool M-Link Newscaster later this year,” he added. However, it will be a while longer before Newscaster will be able to do live encoding in HEVC. “You could build a computer powerful enough, but it wouldn’t fit in a journalist’s laptop,” he said. Currently LiveWire can do live full HD at 1080i at 2Mbps, and its goal is to do that below 1Mbps with HEVC.
Going live Of course, live HEVC encoding is possible using equipment that isn’t quite as journalist friendly.
Ericsson, for example, demonstrated live Ultra HD video contribution at 50p, 4:2:2, 10-bit resolution, while its new SVP 5500 is claimed to be the world’s first HEVC encoder for mobile, capable of realtime encoding at resolutions up to HD. Its main focus at IBC was delivery to mobile, and its LTE Broadcast products, which combine three new standards (HEVC, eMBMS and MPEG- DASH), are designed to address consumer demand for media services over 4G (LTE). Its AVP 4000 encoder will be
upgradable to HEVC, but it is also claimed to offer gains for existing codecs. It “brings the highest performance we’ve ever had in MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, primarily due to new work with algorithms,” offering 10-20% better efficiency compared to Ericsson’s previous generation, said Fabio Murra, head of portfolio marketing, compression. “Operators can not sit still waiting for HEVC, so they have to maximise the infrastructure they have in place today.” Elemental Technologies has
shown live encoding of HEVC at 1080p below 2.8Mbps using its Elemental Live platform. It also showed 10-bit 4K and full frame rate HEVC video processing, as well as 4K HEVC
High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC or H.265) was one of the hot topics at IBC, writes David Fox. It can potentially deliver video at half the bandwidth needed by H.264, making it easier to transmit high definition to mobiles or higher resolutions such as 4K or 8K to set-top boxes
compression Haivision previewed end-to-
end live streaming of HEVC, using software-based encoding and decoding, as well as Hybrid Encoding, which makes the most of CPU and GPU utilisation for encoding or transcoding. This offers the combined density gains of GPU acceleration while maintaining the quality gains of pure software on the CPU. Haivision’s initial approach will take advantage of the latest Intel CPUs, which incorporate GPUs directly as cores within the chip.
HEVC on trial Thomson Video Networks also showed live HEVC broadcast and decoding using its latest
www.tvbeurope.com November2013
Richard Aylmer-Hall: HEVC contribution at 1Mbps should match what H.264 can do at 2Mbps
streaming to multiple devices, and live HEVC encoding via Elemental Cloud. Allegro DVT’s AL1200 and AL2200 were claimed to be “the world’s first live broadcast encoder and transcoder for HEVC” for resolutions up to HD. They support Transport Stream output and MPEG- DASH, and come with either HD-SDI or MPEG-TS inputs. Ateme released its first HEVC
product, in the form of software upgrades allowing HEVC encoding to be embedded in both Titan Live/Titan File (its carrier-grade software video transcoding system for multiscreen delivery) and Kyrion DR8400, its universal Integrated Received Decoder (which was claimed to be the first IRD that can decode HEVC).
ViBE VS7000 multi-screen video system, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor (which has HEVC decoding built in and is used in mobile devices), and adaptive streaming using MPEG-DASH. “Bringing a new technology to this space requires a perfect alignment of the entire video ecosystem,” said Eric Gallier, TVN’s VP of marketing. “Illustrating the readiness of HEVC and DASH from the headend to the end-user device is a key step toward demonstrating to broadcasters how practical deployments can be implemented.”
The VS7000 is being used by
HISPASAT for its 4K trial channel, which was launched at IBC and is one of the first steps in the H2B2VS and UltraHD4U
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