FEATURE
experience (Frame Compatible) and in third part, we will describe a full HD dual-stream 3DTV service (Service Compatible), and we will show comparative results of both services.
Frame Compatible 3DTV Service
The Frame Compatible 3DTV service method was used to broadcast ‘2010 Colourful Daegu Pre-Championship Meeting’ and ‘Worldcup2010’. This service method uses side-by-side 3D content streams that consists of left and right videos scaled down to half horizontally, respectively, to fit into one HD frame. This type of service has advantages such as compatibility with legacy DTV broadcasting equipments and systems and easy handling of 3D images because two left and right images are converted to a side- by-side image format. But the drawback of this method is that the quality of 3D content is downgraded by half and conventional DTV receivers just display horizontally attached left & right pictures, not 3D video.
Video formats for the Frame Compatible method include side-by-side, top and bottom, line-by-line and checkerboard and are presented in Fig 1. In KBS’ 3DTV trial run of the ‘2010 Colourful Daegu Pre-Championship Meeting’, a frame Compatible 3DTV signal was encoded at 17Mbps using the MPEG-2 compression standard and a side-by- side video format. It was aired on physical channel 66 (virtual channel 3-3). For the benefit of those who did not have 3DTV, KBS installed a 620-inch 3D LED screen in Yeouido Park, Seoul and provided free 3DTV glasses for on-site watchers. Before the competition began, KBS held the world’s first live 3DTV broadcast of a celebratory concert on a stage in front of the screen. Tens of thousands of viewers with 3DTVs in the Seoul area were able to see the live broadcast on channel 66.
Figure 2: Frame Compatible 3DTV service Service Compatible 3DTV Service
A Service Compatible 3DTV service has been aired since October 2010. The Service Compatible 3DTV service will provide a dual-stream full HD 3DTV service at the ‘G20 summit meeting’ in November 2010 and is scheduled to broadcast live ‘IAAF World Championships’ in August 2011. This method needs two full-HD video streams which come from left and right cameras separately. These are captured, saved, edited individually and encoded by different coding schemes and transmitted on the air. To view this 3DTV service, you need one of the newly developed 3DTV receivers that can decode dual-stream 3D video. However this service method does have backward compatibility for DTV, which means that if you have conventional DTV, you can watch the left HD video as 2D. On the other hand the broadcaster cannot use a conventional DTV broadcasting network and needs new dual-stream 3D equipment and systems, resulting in extra cost. In Korea, analog-switch- off is scheduled for 2012. It will cost broadcasters a lot to change from analog to digital broadcasting systems so the additional; reconfiguration for 3DTV flow could impose a severe financial burden. Also it requires additional bandwidth for dual-stream full HD video.
In the Service Compatible 3DTV test run, the left video is encoded as 11~12Mbps using the MPEG-2 compression
Figure 1: Frame Compatible 3DTV video format
Figure 3: Service compatible 3DTV service
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