[opendtv] 20060912 Twang's Tuesday Tribune (Mark's Monday Memo)
- From: Mark Schubin <tvmark@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: tvmark@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 23:52:13 -0400 (GMT-04:00)
Here are some very efficient (low-administrative-cost) relief
organizations (all have four-star ratings from CharityNavigator.org):
<http://www.americares.org/>
<http://www.redcross.org/donate/donate.html>
<http://www.directrelief.org/index.html>
<http://www.hopeww.org/>
<http://www.mercycorps.org/splash/>
Americans may also call the Red Cross at 800 HELP NOW (800 435-7669).
- Follow-ups:
- ***The Technology Retreat***, January 31-February 2 -
- The Wednesday-morning supersession this year will be on consumer
electronics. It should be interesting, to say the least.
- The deadline for letting me know you're interested in making a
presentation in the main program has been extended to October 15. I've had
quite a few requests already, and more came in during the International
Broadcasting Convention (IBC) this past weekend. No need to be formal. A
sentence or two about the proposed presentation is fine. And, while I'm happy
to hear from anyone, before I accept a proposal, I need to hear (or get a
message) from the presenter.
- There is no deadline on demo space, but it's allocated on a
first-come, first-served basis, so don't wait too long (it is free, after all).
- There is no deadline and there are no qualifications (other than
being a registered attendee) for moderating a breakfast roundtable. Just let
me know the topic, the day (Thursday or Friday), and the moderator, and I can
confirm instantly. You can even change your mind about topic or moderator up
to the last minute, BUT once you commit to a roundtable you need to cover it
somehow. We've got three so far:
- The ever-entertaining and shocking author of "The Audio/Video
Cable Installer's Pocket Guide" as well as "Wire, Cable, and Fiber Optics for
Video & Audio Engineers," Belden's Stephen Lampen, will be moderating a Friday
roundtable that asks the big question: "Run Anything on Unshielded Twisted
Pairs?"
- Editor, producer, cinematographer, and digital-cinema pioneer
Harry Mathias, chief technology officer of DCMP consulting and co-author of the
seminal book "Electronic Cinematography: Achieving Photographic Control over
the Video Image," will be moderating two roundtables. On Thursday, he'll
moderate "Digital Cinema Projectors: Consistent Calibration of Color
Teleperature." On Friday, he'll do "Field Experience with Digital Cinema
Projector Maintenance."
- Although they're not confirmed yet, expect some pre-Retreat
seminars on January 30, as usual.
- I'm also taking suggestions for the three softball-team names this
year.
- Here are FAQs, in case you're not familiar with the event:
<http://www.hpaonline.com/mc/page.do?sitePageId=23995>
Here's some press coverage from the 2006 Retreat:
<http://www.hpaonline.com/mc/page.do?sitePageId=28687>
Here's the program from the 2006 Retreat:
<http://www.hpaonline.com/mc/page.do?sitePageId=25988>
Here are pictures from the 2006 Retreat:
<http://www.hpaonline.com/mc/page.do?sitePageId=28779>
- Don't hate yourself for the rest of your life. BE THERE!
<http://www.hpaonline.com/mc/page.do?sitePageId=36359>
- "Digital television" sales for the 29th week - My eye slipped to the
total video products line. The "digital television" figure for the 29th week
should have been 357,179. The other figures are as reported by the Consumer
Electronics Association (CEA).
- The LG/Zenith 8-VSB patent - Inventor Al Limberg posted some interesting
comments on the OpenDTV Forum. He thinks LG could pursue the encoding side
(they have six years to do so even after the patent expires, for infringement
during the patent term). He says Samsung has "far and away the largest
portfolio of DTV receiver patents." As for other receiver manufacturers,
"Remember you only need one good blocking patent to be in a good bargaining
position. It's not just numbers that count":
<//www.freelists.org/archives/opendtv/09-2006/msg00009.html>
- Next-generation consumer disks (the subject of a ***Technology
Retreat*** proposed presentation) -
- Warren Communications News has reported that a presentation at the
Internationale Funkausstellung (IFA) consumer-electronics show in Berlin said
HD DVD decks in Europe will be better, but also costlier, than those in the
U.S. The story is no longer on their site:
<http://www.warren-news.com/>
- Toshiba and Memory-Tech have come up with three-layer disks that
can carry two DVD layers and one HD DVD or vice versa. It's to be submitted to
the DVD Forum for approval before the end of this year:
<http://news.digitaltrends.com/article11271.html>
- EE Times reports both formats are still awaiting content-protection
agreements:
<http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192500945>
- The $50 DTT receiver - Freeview set-top boxes are already selling for
less than $50 at UK supermarkets:
<//www.freelists.org/archives/opendtv/09-2006/msg00015.html>
- HD PVR - TiVo is finally coming out with one, for a suggested $800:
<http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2006-09-11-tivo-high-def_x.htm>
- May 1 -
- Neither the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) nor the
National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) updated their lists recently.
- Doug Lung's RF Report notes 972 licensed U.S. DTT stations in the
FCC CDBS database as of September 5:
<http://www.tvtechnology.com/dlrf/one.php?id=1396>
- "Nearly two years after the FCC mandated the use of PSIP, reports can still
be heard of stations struggling to get it right." That's the first sentence of
ATSC vp Jerry Whitaker's column in TV Technology:
<http://www.tvtechnology.com/features/atsc/2006.09.06-f_Whitaker.shtml>
- International Broadcasting Convention (IBC), Amsterdam:
- One day before it closed, attendance hit 42,500:
<http://www.ibc.org/cgi-bin/ibc_dailynews_cms.cgi?db_id=23767&issue=6>
- My biggest hit on the show floor was FrameFree Technologies, in a tiny
booth at the far wall of one hall. If I say their product is morphing software
that took 15 years to develop, you will get a certain impression. Please try
not to form any opinion until the end of this section. The morphing is so good
that it automatically identifies not only facial features and geometric
features (like doorways, windows, hallways, etc.) but also such obscure
characteristics as the crests of waves. When it can't identify correspondence
(e.g., between a face and a shoe), it takes only a few seconds to establish
what's desired. They morphed my face into my torso in a minute or two
perfectly. So far it still sounds like morphing software.
So now add editing-type timelines. You can drop any pictures anywhere on
a timeline and slide them around. You can then specify what happens to the
picture and how it morphs into the next one (if it does). The system
interpolates all intermediate frames. They showed a watch commercial created
from a handful of photographs supplied by the watch company. They also showed
a 12-minute segment of a movie created with a number of photographs of an
actress and some photographs of backgrounds. I'm not sure, but I wouldn't be
surprised if it took less time to create than to watch. So it's a
content-creation tool.
Now consider those interpolated intermediate frames. At an IBC many years
ago, Snell & Wilcox showed a prototype of a system called Gazelle that was to
have turned any video into smooth slow motion by interpolation. FrameFree can
do that, but it can also transmit only key frames and instructions about what
to do with them rather than entire videos. A video file that occupies 40 MB
might be sent as just 4 MB. For mobile phones, they simply include a copy of
their player with the file. So it's a file-size reduction tool.
If the interpolation is so good, what happens if you feed it video? It
starts dropping frames, interpolating between what's left, comparing the
interpolated frames to the originals, and creating error signals that can be
sent to restore the video. As long as the errors are below the desired
threshold, the system can keep dropping frames; when they exceed the threshold,
a frame goes back in. So, although it's not exactly something you can do live,
the system can compress video, too -- to a fraction of the data rate of even
MPEG-4 AVC, they say. They're hoping to get SMPTE to standardize the
compression scheme.
I've probably left some significant stuff out, but, in case you can't
tell, I was pretty impressed. Their pricing is pretty impressive, too:
<http://www.framefree.com/>
- I'll try to divide the rest into technology categories:
- Acquisition:
- You may be aware that there's no SMPTE D-4 format, because "4"
connotes death in some Asian languages. But "8" is a lucky number. So Fujinon
came out with an 88x8.8 compact HD lens. They also had a REALLY compact 22x7
box lens and some half-inch lenses for Sony's XDCAM HD.
- There were unusual new camera mounts from Brains & Pictures
(Studio R), Innovision (the 6-axis Z-shuttle), and Plazamedia/Skyline (I
particularly liked the lightweight PylonCam).
- Plazamedia/Skyline also offered RemoteCam HD1100, 45x52x50 mm
with a 2/3-inch 1920x1080 CMOS progressive-scan sensor that takes C-mount
lenses. The pictures were already very impressive, and they're still working
on them.
- Grass Valley introduced the 1080p LDK-8000 (with dual-link
HD-SDI for 1080p50 or 1080p60 outputs). They still wouldn't divulge anything
about the resolution of the sensors in Infinity, but the pictures looked very
good.
- Ultramotion's Antelope camera offers 720p HD to about 2000
frames per second (one sign said 3000) and SD to about 5000.
- Red showed pictures from their camera via a 4K projector on a
giant screen. For early work, it was very impressive. They also blew up a
frame and posted it in their (now open) tent. The camera body has also been
redesigned and is now rail-based.
- Sony's 2/3-inch digital-cinematography camcorder emerged from
the case it was in at NAB. There were strange press reactions about it being a
replacement for the Panavision Genesis. They have nothing in common except the
manufacturer of their sensors and, potentially, in the case of the Genesis,
their recorders.
- Canada's Communications Research Centre (CRC) joined those
offering ways to generate stereoscopic information from flat video.
- Storage:
- Maycom and Technica del Arte both had devices to turn PDAs
into audio recorders. Maycom had a whole range of other tiny devices,
including a USB-key-based audio editor.
- TDK announced its six-layer 200 GB Blu-ray disks, and small
JVC multi-disk "juke-box" Blu-ray library systems were all over the show.
JVC's juke-boxes can handle up to 600 disks, so a combination of the two would
mean 120 TB of storage. InPhase's holographic storage disks, which could
ultimately offer even more storage, were at several sites at the show,
including Ikegami's exhibit.
- Prestospace offered optical playback of old 78 rpm records.
- Processing:
- KulaByte's multicore compression processing is faster than
real time, which means they can do live multi-pass coding. The BBC and the CRC
both offered wavelet compression; the BBC's, Dirac, is open source.
- Neotion offered MPEG-4 AVC adapters in what appeared to be a
PCMCIA form factor and said it could plug into any integrated DTV (presumably
not ATSC versions).
- The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) offered an interesting
compression demo. They stacked three identical large 1080p-capable HD
displays. They shot material with a 1080p camera and downconverted it to 1080i
and 720p. They fed all three types of signals into MPEG-4 AVC compression
systems and fed the outputs of the systems into the displays. At extremely
high data rates, all three looked good, and 1080p probably looked best. At low
data rates, however -- even as high as 13 Mbps -- 720p looked better than
1080p; the latter stressed the compression too much. 720p looked better than
1080i, too.
- After being offered exclusively by Shibasoku,
motion-compensated HD standards conversion burst loose at the show, though only
the For-A FRC-7000 is yet being delivered (it looks very good). Next will
probably be the Pro-bel/Digital Vision Cifer, followed by the Snell & Wilcox
Alchemist HD with Ph.C. Unfortunately for me, only the last will initially
handle the 1080p25 that I'm often asked to convert. The CRC also had
motion-compensated frame-rate conversion, and Fraunhofer showed judder-free
ways to convert 24 fps to even 25 fps without speeding it up.
- Snell & Wilcox's Quasar upconverter will probably come out
first. Its pictures look great! So do those of the Brick House Syntax
upconverter, using the Let It Wave FPGA chip. I'd love to see a shootout
between them.
- Astro showed downconversions to 4K from (what else?) NHK's
ultra-HDTV (same as at the NAB show).
- Fraunhofer had much more, including a complete, protected
digital-cinema workflow (they're considering presenting it at ***The Technology
Retreat***; KulaByte and FrameFree might come, too) and a surround-sound
"spatial" mixing console. They also head the Matris project for camera-motion
estimation.
- Chyron has turned a feature of Camio into Wapstr, a system for
putting mobile-phone photos and video on air in a hurry:
<http://www.ibc.org/cgi-bin/ibc_dailynews_cms.cgi?db_id=23750&issue=6>
- Distribution:
- The show was full of TV for mobile phones and IPTV. Of the
former, the bmcoforum (broadcast mobile convergence) had a poster showing three
prone young women all watching TV on the same mobile phone at the beach, two of
them wearing sunglasses. An LCD in direct sunlight? Through possibly
polarized sunglasses?
- TelecomTV announce pre-show viewing of IBC TV online in excess
of 8000 before the show even opened. This story is from Broacast Engineering's
Beyond the Headlines newsletter:
<http://tinyurl.com/ml4ny>
- Rosenberger ASI showed non-SMPTE hermaphroditic camera-fiber
connectors used at the FIFA World Cup.
- There were all-purpose (terrestrial broadcast, cable,
satellite, and IPTV) set-top boxes. Set-top-box maker Pace was showing content
protection rather than connection protection.
- Avocent and Samsung (probably among others) showed wireless
HDMI with HDCP. DS2 (Design of Systems on Silicon) showed HDTV over power
lines.
- Fuji Television (not Fujinon) showed an essentially
zero-latency, two-way 120-GHz millimeter-wave wireless link good to about 2 km
and 10 Gbps.
- Israel's Amos satellites exhibit was diagonally across from
Arabsat's Badr.
- Presentation:
- NTT had a "Depth-Fused" dual-LCD stereoscopic display, with
the two LCDs stacked (you look through one to see the other). No glasses are
needed, and there's no sweet spot of distance, but to see really good 3-D, you
need to view the screen pretty much on axis.
- The mobility section of the new-technology campus had amazing
displays. There was a working, shirt-pocket-sized color laser video projector,
in focus at any distance, from Symbol Technologies. There was a mobile phone
with built-in projector (the PicoP) from Microvision. There were many video
goggles and many roll-up displays and (though it doesn't necessarily have
anything to do with video) the i.Tech Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard formed by a
laser projecting a keyboard on a surface and sensing what your fingers are
doing.
- There were many pretty-good-looking 4-mm-pitch LED screens.
- GTG had a fun looking outdoor exhibit with large flat-screen
video displays moving around and spinning, but it was impossible to see the
video in the bright sunlight.
- Screen Technology offered fiber-optic-faceplate LCD screens to
prevent washout in bright studio lighting.
- Sony's secret technology room was showing their version of an
LCD display intended to match and replace the BVM CRT displays, which they say
are no longer legal in the European Union (but the new Observe large, expando
production truck, based in Ireland, used all-CRT monitoring).
- Test & measurement:
- OmniTek's TQ seems to measure EVERYTHING about audio, video,
and their relationships to one another (not to mention captions, teletext,
macroblocks, etc.).
- DK Technologies, normally known for audio monitoring, came up
with a "spinner" histogram display for component video. They say it's easier
to use than waveforms.
I've barely scratched the surface here.
- Strange but true department: NASA actually used HDNet video to help analyze
the Atlantis launch. This story is from Broadcast Engineering's HD Technology
newsletter:
<http://tinyurl.com/jdbn5>
I had my doubts, so I checked. It is, indeed, true.
International news: A return path for Freeview DTT is coming along:
<http://www.dtg.org.uk/news/news.php?class=countries&subclass=0&id=1925>
- The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has released its "Digital America
2006":
<http://www.ce.org/Press/CEA_Pubs/1988.asp>
It's chock-full of interesting information. Did you know, for example,
that 45% of the mobile phones sold in the U.S. in 2005 were camera phones (up
from 26% in 2004) and that it was 64% in western Europe and 90% in Japan?
<http://www.ce.org/Press/CEA_Pubs/2088.asp>
Did you know the average cost of a VCR in 2005 was $24?
<http://www.ce.org/Press/CEA_Pubs/2005.asp>
- I have received CEA's sales figures for weeks 34 and 35, but I'm not
permitted to release them yet.
- DVD news: J&R advertised a 100-pack of TDK blank DVDs for $24.99.
- Memory news:
- J&R had a SanDisk 2GB SD card advertised for $39.99 after rebate.
- Samsung has a new form of flash with a 32 GB device:
<http://tinyurl.com/f4j8p>
- A proposed treaty from the World Intellectual-Property Organization (WIPO) is
said to give broadcasters rights to what they air, even if it's not their
creations. Many people oppose this:
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/08/wipo_treaty_opposition/>
The NAB says the opponents are wrong, and broadcasters need the
protections. This story is from Radio and Records:
<http://tinyurl.com/joztd>
- The FCC has come up with a schedule for allowing unlicensed operations in TV
bands:
<http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-06-1813A1.pdf>
- Upcoming Dates (DTV and non-DTV):
- *September 21, National Geographic, Washington, D.C., SMPTE D.C. section
meeting on broadcast-quality archiving
<http://www.smpte.org/sections_chapters/washdc/dcmeeting.html>.
- September 27-29, Hotel Washington, Washington, D.C., IEEE Broadcast
Symposium <http://www.ieee.org/organizations/society/bt/sympo.html>.
- *September 28, BAFTA, London, European Digital Cinema Conference
<http://www.emapconferencesites.co.uk/digitalcinema/homepage.asp>.
- October 3-5, Hotel Fort Des Moines, Des Moines, Iowa, Iowa DTV Symposium
<http://www.iptv.org/dtv/2005/>.
- October 4-6, Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, Jackson Hole Tech
Symposium <http://www.jhfestival.org/symposium2006/>.
- October 18-21, Renaissance Hollywood Hotel, SMPTE convention
<http://www.smpte.org/conferences/148cfp.cfm>.
- *October 23, Marriott Orlando World Center, ShowEast
<http://www.showeast.com/filmgroup/showeast/index.jsp>.
- October 23-26, NAB New York <http://www.nabnewyork.com/>.
- *November 6-7, Grand Marina Hotel, Barcelona, High Definition in Europe:
Making Business Happen <http://www.uands.com/events/hdconference/>.
- *November 8, Grand Marina Hotel, Barcelona, DVD Forum Europe Conference
<http://www.dvdforum.org/promo-euroconf.htm>.
- November 29-30, Javits Convention Center, New York, HD World
<http://www.hdworldshow.com/>.
- December 5-6, Hilton Universal City, High Definition Summit
<http://www.multichannel.com/contents/pdf/HD%20Summit1sheetHDWEB.pdf>
- January 8-11, Las Vegas, International Consumer Electronics Show
<http://www.cesweb.org/default.asp>.
- ***January 31-February 2, The Westin at Mission Hills, Rancho Mirage
(Palm Springs area), California, ***HPA Technology Retreat***
<http://www.hpaonline.com>.
- *March 28-29, Orange County Convention Center, Orlando, IEEE
International Symposium on Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting
<http://www.ieee.org/organizations/society/bt/BMS07/07bmsindex.html>.
- April 14-19, Las Vegas Convention Center, NAB convention
<http://www.nabshow.com/>.
- April 18-21, Atlanta Convention Center, Satellite Expo 2007 with C-band
Pioneers Reunion <http://www.bobcooper.tv/c-band-reunion.htm>.
* - new or revised listing
TTFN,
Mark
PS Permission is granted to forward this or any other Monday Memo. Next
week's memo might be late.
Have a question about the memo? Before contacting me, please try the FAQs and
glossary in the second postscript to the January 5 memo:
<http://www.digitaltelevision.com/mondaymemo/mlist/frm02213.html>
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