encoding

Events, Network Infrastructure

HEVC: A New Video Coding Standard for the Multi-screen World

June 7, 2012 : BY Motorola

Author: Ajay Luthra, Vice President, Advanced Technology Group, Motorola Mobility

Each year, The Cable Show offers the industry a chance to twist the knobs, pull the levers, and feast on innovations that will help manage cable’s most vexing problems. HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) is a new video coding standard that’s picking up steam and has the potential to make a significant impact on video streaming to multiple devices and the bandwidth requirements to handle the load.

Streaming video now consumes the lion’s share of bandwidth. In the US, over 37 billion videos were viewed in April alone. With the surge in the use of tablets, smartphones, and gaming devices, streaming video shows no signs of slowing.

The aim of HEVC is to reduce the bit rate requirement to half of that needed by today’s most efficient standard, AVC (MPEG-4 Part 10/H.264), to achieve similar visual quality. Why is this important? While some of the demand for higher bandwidth will be satisfied by improvements in current infrastructure and migration to newer higher bandwidth networking technologies, that alone will not be nearly sufficient. Therefore, a video compression technology with coding efficiency better than AVC is needed.

Motorola has been actively participating in the development of the HEVC standard by helping the committee to understand the needs of our customers and making technical contributions. We have also been developing plans to provide solutions to our customers in a timely fashion that will help them grow their business and lower their costs. We expect this standard to be adopted in a wide range of our products, from set-top boxes, to tablets and smartphones, and to the next generation of transcoding and other cloud-related products. It will support a wide array of services ranging from HDTV and Ultra High-Definition TV (UHDTV, aka 4kx2k) distribution, to streaming video, to 3DTV, to Internet TV, to TV on Demand, and more.

In February 2012, HEVC reached the milestone of the ISO/IEC committee draft.  It is expected to reach the milestones of Draft International Standard (DIS) in July 2012 and Final Draft International Standard (FDIS), ready to be ratified as standard in January 2013.

At The Cable Show, Motorola showcased the evolution of TV and a smart, simple connected home. In the video below, you can see our demonstration of HEVC video compression technologies  and learn more about how we’re rolling this innovation into our products. Surely we’ll hear more exciting developments about HEVC over the next year.

Related Resources:

Video: Motorola Video Processing Solutions for Delivery to Multiple Screens

Tagged as: bandwidth capacity, encoding, HEVC, infrastructure, Luthra, video compression, video processing

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Network Infrastructure

EastLink Brings All MPEG-4 HD Services to Consumers

November 10, 2011 : BY Motorola

Bandwidth intensive services like high-speed Internet, HDTV and 3DTV continue to put a heavy strain on networks.  That is no longer an issue for EastLink, Canada’s largest privately held Cable company, who will now be able to increase high definition (HD) services for its customers. EastLink will now incorporate MPEG-4 video compression technology in all of its broadcast and on-demand HD services.  This major step is a first in the industry and solves bandwidth requirements for EastLink, especially as more services migrate to HD and 3DTV. EastLink deployed the Motorola SE-6601 Encoder to offer MPEG-4 encoding along with two HD set-tops, the DCX3400-M and DCX700-M. These set-tops allow for the migration of HD broadcast and on-demand services to MPEG-4, again saving bandwidth without sacrificing the user experience or picture quality. 

The Motorola SE6000 line of Encoders includes our patented perceptual video processing technology that selectively attenuates details in an image, leading to improved compression efficiencies. Additionally, through integrating the Motorola CAP1000, EastLink can now benefit from more advanced capabilities like ad insertion, rate shaping and simultaneous channel substitutions.

The move to provide all HD services in MPEG-4 allows EastLink to free-up the bandwidth needed to easily support the first steps to IPTV delivery. Read more in today’s announcement.

Tagged as: 3DTV, encoding, HDTV, Set Tops

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Network Infrastructure

HD Video Encoding: Improving Video Quality with *More* HD Streams in a Single QAM

October 24, 2011 : BY Motorola

Author: Kevin Wirick, Vice President and General Manager, Video Processing Solutions 

When HD television was commercialized, there were those who couldn’t imagine the need for it, and those who rapidly took to the task of measuring pixel quality and comparing HD streams across different programmers and providers. In delivering TV to the latter group, it has always been a challenge to balance quality concerns with bandwidth limitations—it’s the age old question of Quantity vs. Quality. In truth, consumers deserve both, and the more competitive the market gets, the more providers need new, innovative encoders that can help them give consumers a wide selection of great experiences.

Today, Motorola is demonstrating HD video encoding technology that improves compression efficiency enough that operators can suddenly consider adding more channels to existing QAMs and satellite transponders even as they deliver better video quality. We’ve done this by adding new patented technology to our SE-6000 encoders so that bits are allocated to the parts of a video picture that are most important. It’s part of our perceptual video processing (PVP) technology. We can selectively attenuate details in an image that are both hard to perceive and hard to compress. This helps us reduce the number of bits needed to render an image, while also improving image quality.

 

Prioritizing certain parts of an image over others is called Adaptive Detail Preservation (ADP). ADP can improve bandwidth up to 50 percent for difficult images with high-energy background motion, and it creates an average bandwidth savings of around 20 percent.

Equally important, the use of ADP – and PVP as a whole – can improve the video playback experience for viewers. In addition to enhancing certain aspects of an image, the technology helps improve channel sharing by ensuring that individual streams in a QAM don’t interfere with each other and degrade performance.

Combined with MPEG-4 compression, our latest HD video encoding technologies baked into the SE-6000 can bring the load of a single HD stream to five megabits per second or less for some types of content. As narrowcast video demand grows, this increased efficiency makes it possible to continue adding to content libraries, improving service value.

For more information on the science behind perceptual video processing, view this video from my colleague, Sean McCarthy.

Tagged as: encoding, infrastructure, perceptual video processing, QAM

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