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How to turn a $20,000 Ultra HDTV into a mass-market product

Sean McCarthy, Motorola Mobility — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 18:26:27 +0000

HDTV has already evolved from a luxury to a now-ubiquitous item in households everywhere. While there’s still plenty to love about high definition video, as always consumers are in constant pursuit of an ever clearer, crisper picture.

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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VLC 1.0 Goldeneye Released

Christopher Ryan — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:00:12 +0000

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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Handbrake 0.9.3 Brings New Video Sources

Weldon Dodd — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 04:00:42 +0000

The video encoding and transcoding tool, Handbrake has been updated to 0.9.3. This latest release brings a number of substantial changes to this excellent video utility.

The two most fundamental changes make Handbrake more flexible and also more limited. First flexibility — Handbrake will now accept many different video sources and does far more than just DVDs. The second change is that DVD decrypting has been completely decoupled from Handbrake and you’ll need another app to do perform that step in the conversion process. This version has a number of other improvements for Mac, Apple TV, and iPod users. Read the release notes to get a full list of changes.

Video Cornucopia

Just in time to help us deal with our grief at the passing of Techspansion and its seminal video converter, Visual Hub, Handbrake now has the ability to convert all sorts of different source material to H.264 or MPEG4 video. This potentially allows Handbrake to transcode AVI video from digital cameras and other such files. This new flexibility comes as a benefit of incorporating the libavcodec and libavformat libraries from the FFmpeg project. Unfortunately, the AVI file from a Canon P&S camera I used to test this on resulted in great looking video with a bunch of static in the audio track.

DVD Decryption Decoupled

For reasons that perhaps only the developers fully understand, Handbrake no longer includes the libraries required to decrypt commercial DVD’s. We Mac users are fortunate in that Handbrake will dynamically use VLC to decrypt a DVD if the app is present in your Applications folder. Just install VLC as you would normally and then anything that can be played with VLC can be read by Handbrake. If you want, you can also use something like RipIt, DVD2OneX, or Mac The Ripper 3 to decrypt DVD’s and place a copy on your hard drive. Personally, I’ve found RipIt.app does exactly what I want (makes a copy of the full DVD to the hard drive) and is dead simple to use. It costs $19, but it is simpler than the convoluted MTR donationware process (join the forums at ripdifferent.com to get the details), and cheaper than D2OX.

Other Benefits for Apple Fans

Besides the built-in VLC integration (a Mac exclusive), Apple users also get a number of improvements to the Mac GUI like better organization of presets, a better queue (that is saved between sessions or in case of a crash), reading from ZFS volumes, and more. Many of the presets have been redone as well to take advantage of the updates to the underlying encoding libraries. The new Apple TV preset is great at constant quality and supports Dobly Digital for Apple TV files directly (that still work with Apple TV 2.3). If you are really interested in tweaking the Apple TV preset to get transparent standard definition DVD, you’ll want to hang out in this thread at the Handbrake forums. The iPod and Universal presets have been updated as well. Be sure to “Update Built-in Presets” from the Presets menu when running the app to make sure you have latest settings.

Summary

I have been using the development snapshots for a while now and the improvements in video quality are great. I am really glad to see the changes move into the standard release. Taking out DVD decryption is not a huge deal because there are other alternatives for the Mac. And adding the ability to work with a wider variety of video formats is particularly welcome now that Visual Hub is no longer being developed. I will post follow-up comments if I figure out what caused my issues with my AVI video file. Let us know about your experiences with Handbrake 0.9.3.

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