[opendtv] Re: TANDBERG launch MPEG-2 Broadcast Encoder
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2009 10:40:09 -0400
At 3:47 PM -0400 4/17/09, Manfredi, Albert E wrote:
Here's something for those who think MPEG-2 coding efficiency was maxed
out for all time.
I like the way they had to throw in "carbon footprint," as the catch-all
phrase du jour that proves virtuosity.
Bert
Hmmmmm....
Wonder if Bert bothered to consider a few important questions related
to this announcement.
Re the 15% savings in bandwidth:
Relative to WHAT?
Their previous generation MPEG-2 encoders?
The most efficient encoders produced by other manufacturers?
Re the implementation:
They say they are using proprietary technology including their own
algorithms. That's cool, as the MPEG-2 standard only defines the
decoder. But this raises the question of how far one can go to
produce the most efficient MPEG-2 bitstreams?
The full press release reveals:
To achieve these performance enhancements in MPEG-2, TANDBERG
Television's award-winning engineering team has drawn on its more
than 15 year video compression heritage and leveraged the forty-fold
increase in processing power in the past decade to create a
completely new approach and implementation of MPEG-2 Video. The all
in-house design uses many new patent pending TANDBERG Television
technologies and discrete, fully programmable devices. The team has
also applied techniques developed and enhanced for MPEG-4 AVC such
as Rate Distortion Optimization (RDO) and Adaptive GOP structures,
and the EN8100 is packed with technology innovations for
pre-processing and multi-point encoding.
So it appears that Tandberg is applying techniques learned from
implementing h.264 to improve h.262 encoding. This makes sense in a
world that has tens of millions of deployed MPEG-2 decoders in walled
garden distribution systems.
But MPEG-4 AVC is making major inroads in applications where a large
installed base of hardware decoders is NOT a business issue. For
example, Tandberg also announced that the ABC network has migrated to
MPEG-4 for distribution of programming to their affiliates, using
Tandberg encoders. And h.264 already dominates Internet video
distribution, a playing field where MPEG-2 never got a foothold.
So the reality is that the migration to MPEG-4 is already well down
the path in the U.S. and Europe, and will likely start to impact U.S.
Cable system in the next year or two, as their DBS competitors
complete their transition to h.264 capable STBs.
Still, it is not surprising that Bert continues to hold onto the past...
Regards
Craig
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