This next generation of video is dubbed Ultra HDTV, and it will offer consumers an incredibly compelling experience – four times the resolution of today’s HDTV, unfathomable contrast, and mind-blowing, life-like picture quality. Imagine not being able to tell the difference between your TV’s picture and looking out your window? Simply put, Ultra HD does to HDTV what color programming did to the black-and-white TV.

Because we witnessed the widespread adoption of HDTV followed by the stark lack of penetration of 3DTV, we know that consumer embrace of technological advancements like this are hardly a given. So what will it take for the general public to get behind Ultra HD?

Behind the screen

Price, availability, engaging (and accessible) programming and the selection of devices are certainly important factors in the potential success of Ultra HD, but one crucial component often gets overlooked: the video-processing technology behind these incredible innovations. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg dilemma for the TV world.

HD became our standard TV format due in large part to technology that enables digital video compression, a video codec called H.264. Clearly consumers’ demands for even higher quality streaming video are not going to subside for the foreseeable future. They crave it, and service providers must find ways to quench this thirst while managing bandwidth, and ultimately, network costs. The answer is Ultra HD (often referred to as 4K video), but for it to truly take off, in the same fashion as HD, service providers must embrace a newer, more powerful video codec called HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding).

The advantages of HEVC

Ultra HDTVs display four times the amount of pixels as HDTVs — and can require up to four times the bandwidth. It should go without saying that service providers don’t look forward to dealing with four times the bandwidth congestion. One major reason HEVC is so essential then is because it packages large amounts of data required to transmit Ultra HD content into manageable chunks, by reducing the bit rate (the number of bits per second transmitted along a digital network) to levels that make sense for service providers.

In fact, early studies have shown HEVC is twice as effective as H.264 – meaning service providers will need, at most, twice the bandwidth they’re using for HD content today to deliver four times the resolution and crystal-clear picture clarity. Sports programming fanatics and movie junkies like me are already salivating at the idea.

Market opportunity

DisplaySearch estimates 600M connected TVs in households by 2015. Add consumers’ appetite for tablets, smartphones, gaming consoles and every other connected device under the sun, and it’s clear the demand for high-quality video isn’t limited to living room sets. Thus service providers will need a solution  that supports a wide range of services, including HDTV, Ultra HDTV, streaming video and on-demand content.

HEVC is the best technology capable of encoding this next wave of Ultra-HD video content  for the living room and, in the not-as-distant-as-you’d-expect future, mobile devices. Tapping HEVC now could mean a 50 percent savings on service providers’ bandwidth costs, and help push video to every edge of every distribution network.

Support from the industry

It’s not a complex notion: Consumers want more video, from more devices, and they expect the best possible quality from their service providers. Today, the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding, established by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group, is working feverishly to ensure HEVC is readily available for widespread adoption.

In fact, the Final Draft International Standard is scheduled to be made available later this month, which is certain to launch a wave of new HEVC-powered products. The first Ultra HDTVS are now available – though currently only to those who have $20,000 to spend.  But as always prices can be expected to drop quickly, so that we should see consumers adding Ultra HDTVs to their holiday wish lists in 2013. Nonetheless, it will be up to the service providers to adopt HEVC quickly to make Ultra HDTVs – and its game-changing video quality and resolution – a reality.

Sean McCarthy is a technical fellow at Motorola Mobility, Inc., where he leads advancements in video processing, compression and practical vision science. Dr. McCarthy holds patents on image and signal processing and served on the board of the MPEG Industry Forum. 

Photo courtesy of Vlue/Shutterstock.com.

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WebM is based on the VP8 codec that Google acquired as part of its purchase of On2 Technologies in early 2010. Google released WebM with a royalty-free, open-source license a few months later, and since then it has been busy building support for the format by layering it into various Google products.

The search giant dropped support for H.264 in the latest version of its Chrome browser, making WebM the only natively supported format for HTML5 video. It has also been busy transcoding YouTube videos to support WebM for HTML5 video playback.

MPEG LA’s plans to establish a patent pool to be used against WebM are nothing new, as the latest statements follow previous threats by the licensing group. (See here and here.) But this is the first time the group has given a hint that it actually has some patent holders on board to back those threats.

As we’ve written before, MPEG LA’s threats come with a few caveats:

First, despite several similar warnings against [Ogg] Theora, MPEG LA has never acted to enforce its patents against that open-source codec. But Theora has been around since 2000, and as such one could argue that as a result, MPEG LA would have a difficult time enforcing the patents that it supposedly infringes on. But VP8 is more or less brand-spanking new, and therefore fair game.

Second, Google has a lot more resources than Xiph.org — the group that controls Theora — does, and won’t be going down without a fight. It spent more than $120 million to purchase On2 and its technology, and wouldn’t have done so if it weren’t committed to making VP8 open source. Not only that, but the search giant said it’s done its due diligence and is confident that VP8 doesn’t infringe on others’ patents.

Google seems to be readying its own defense against MPEG LA’s patent pool, as it has gotten such companies as LG Electronics and Cisco to provide some backing through the WebM Community Cross-License. At the same time, just the threat of patent litigation against those who choose to adopt the WebM format might be enough to keep some publishers and developers away.

All of that said, all this saber-rattling might not even matter: Despite Google’s best efforts to push adoption for WebM, the format has gotten very little takeup from other publishers or developers. Recent research from MeFeedia found that nearly 70 percent of all videos it indexed were encoded with H.264, compared with just 2 percent of those encoded in WebM.

Photo courtesy of (CC BY 2.0) Flickr user cell105

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VLC media player, an open-source application from the VideoLAN project, finally reached version 1.0 today. The software had its original start back in 1996 as a school project from engineering students at the Ecole Centrale Paris (though it wasn’t released as an open source project until 2001).

Through many point releases before today, VLC has continued to expand its capabilities, offering support for HD codecs, a diverse set of file formats, live recording, AirTunes streaming and more.

Crazy Formats, Got Ya Covered!

VLC is based on FFmpeg, which means it supports a wider variety of codecs and file formats than your typical QuickTime or Windows Media Player can handle, such as MKV, Og, or FLAC. (There are, of course, alternatives, such as Perian and other plugins to add additional support to QuickTime, but VLC has some more tricks up its sleeve.)

Since it’s a packet-based player, VLC supports playing content that could be partially corrupted or is incomplete. This reason alone makes VLC a popular media player for torrent lovers. VLC is a great addition to your system and is a recommended download for switchers who are used to viewing AVI files on the PC, since the AVI container supports a myriad of codecs that are not all supported natively on the Mac platform.

The 1.0 release of VLC, codename Goldeneye, is available for both Intel and PowerPC platforms (though it does require Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6) and can be downloaded here. If you’re using Mac OS X 10.4.x or earlier, you can download the previous build of VLC, version 0.9.9a, from here.

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