Ateme Archives – Page 2 of 2 – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: Early Live Trials of VVC & EVC for OTT Delivery

Posted on 18th December 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Much of 2020 was spent looking forward to the release of VVC, EVC and LC-EVC. A trio of MPEG standards fitting different use cases across this industry and beyond. Now they’ve all been released, it’s time to filter through finding which are the right fit for your workflows.

In this video, Thibaud Biatek from ATEME looks at using EVC and VVC for online streaming. EVC, is the Essential Video Codec, and VVC stands for the Versatile Video Codec. If you’d like to know more about the codecs themselves, check out this video talking about all of them. The driver for new codecs highlighted in the video is that internet traffic is over 70% video. But taking a step back, we need to remember that these codecs all come delivering more than just compression savings. Some, like LCEVC bring easier compression on embedded systems and easier decoding for AI applications. VVC represents the state of the art in compression techniques and EVC offers a totally royalty-free encoding option which is missing from all other MPEG codecs.

MPEG are very open that VVC is the same fundamental design as MPEG 2 was, it’s the techniques in each functional block which have improved in both quantity and ability that marks the difference. As such, Thibaud notes that you can create the same base code for an EVC codec as for VVC, thus you only need one software library to deliver an encode for both codecs. If you look at partitioning the screen into blocks, we see that VVC does everything EVC does but ads the ability to have diagonals. Screen Content Coding (SCC) is a speciality of VVC which adds it as a standard capability, unlike HEVC which had it optional. EVC also has SCC but only contains Intra Block Copy to implement it; VVC has three more on top of IBC.

Thibaud outlines how ATEME have done their initial implementations of VVC and EVC. Though they are not yet full implementations, they are seeing notable improvements over HEVC, particularly for VVC’s encoding of 8K which is attributed to the larger block sizes allowed in partitioning. He then takes us through the trials to date which have involved UHD VVC over satellite to the current test which is a real-time VVC encode to a CMAF ladder of 720p, 1080p and 2160p. In partnership with Akamai, this was then distributed as CMAF to the end-user which was using IETR’s openVVC decoder.

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Speaker

Thibaud Biatek
Reasearch & Innovation Engineer
ATEME

Video: Next-generation audio in the European market – The state of play

Posted on 12th November 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Next-generation audio refers to a range of new technologies which allow for immersive audio like 3D sound, for increased accessibility, for better personalisation and anything which delivers a step-change in the lister experience. NGA technologies can stand on their own but are often part of next-generation broadcast technologies like ATSC 3.0 or UHD/8K transmissions.

This talk from the Sports Video Group and Dolby presents one case study from a few that have happened in 2020 which delivered NGA over the air to homes. First, though, Dolby’s Jason Power brings us up to date on how NGA has been deployed to date and looks at what it is.

Whilst ‘3D sound’ is an easy to understand feature, ‘increased personalisation’ is less so. Jason introduces ideas for personalisation such as choosing which team you’re interested in and getting a different crowd mix dependant on that. The possibilities are vast and we’re only just starting to experiment with what’s possible and determine what people actually want or to change where your mics are, on the pitch or in the stands.

What can I do if I want to hear next-generation audio? Jason explains that four out of five TVs are now shipping with NGA audio and all of the five top manufacturers have support for at least one NGA technology. Such technologies are Dolby’s AC-4 and sADM. AC-4 allows delivery of Dolby Atmos which is an object-based audio format which allows the receiver much more freedom to render the sound correctly based on the current speaker set up. Should you change how many speakers you have, the decoder can render the sound differently to ensure the ‘stereo’ image remains correct.

To find out more about the technologies behind NGA, take a look at this talk from the Telos Alliance.

Next, Matthieu Parmentier talks about the Roland Garros event in 2020 which was delivered using sADM plus Dolby AC-4. sADM is an open specification for metadata interchange, the aim of which is to help interoperability between vendors. The S-ADM metadata is embedded in the SDI and then transported uncompressed as SMPTE 302M.

ATEME’s Mickaël Raulet completes the picture by explaining their approach which included setting up a full end-to-end system for testing and diagnosis. The event itself, we see, had three transmission paths. An SDR satellite backup and two feeds into the DVB-T2 transmitter at the Eiffel Tower.

The session ends with an extensive Q&A session where they discuss the challenges they faced and how they overcame them as well as how their businesses are changing.

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Speakers

	Jason Power Senior Director of Commercial Partnerships & Standards, Dolby
	Mickaël Raulet Vice President of Innovation, ATEME
	Matthieu Parmentier Head of Data & Artificial Intelligence France Television
	Moderator:Roger Charlesworth Charlesworth Media

Video: Codecs, standards and UHD formats – where is the industry headed?

Posted on 23rd March 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Now Available On Demand
UHD transmissions have been available for many years now and form a growing, albeit slow-growing, percentage of channels available. The fact that major players such as Sky and BT Sports in the UK, NBCUniversal and the ailing DirecTV in the US, see fit to broadcast sports in UHD shows that the technology is trusted and mature. But given the prevalence of 4K in films from Netflix, Apple TV+ streaming is actually the largest delivery mechanism for 4K/UHD video into the home.

Following on from last week’s DVB webinar, now available on demand, this webinar from the DVB Project replaces what would have been part of the DVB World 2020 conference and looks at the work that’s gone into getting UHD to were it is now in terms of developing HEVC (also known as H.265), integrating it into broadcast standards plus getting manufacturer support. It then finishes by looking at the successor to HEVC – VVC (Versatile Video Codec)

The host, Ben Swchwarz from the Ultra HD Forum, first introduces Ralf Schaefer who explores the work that was done in order to make UHD for distribution a reality. He’ll do this by looking at the specifications and standards that were created in order to get us where we are today before looking ahead to see what may come next.

Yvonne Thomas from the UK’s Digital TV Group is next and will follow on from Ben by looking at codecs for video and audio. HEVC is seen as the go-to codec for UHD distribution. As the uncompressed bitrate for UHD is often 12Gbps, HEVC’s higher compression ratio compared to AVC and relatively wide adoption makes it a good choice for wide dissemination of a signal. But UHD is more than just video. With UHD and 4K services usually carrying sports or films, ‘next generation audio‘ is really important. Yvonne looks at the video and audio aspects of delivering HEVC and the devices that need to receive it.

Finally we look at VVC, also known as H.266, the successor to HEVC, also known as H.265. ATEME’s Sassan Pejhan gives us a look into why VVC was created, where it currently is within MPEG standardisation and what it aims to achieve in terms of compression. VVC has been covered previously on The Broadcast Knowledge in dedicated talks such as ‘VVC, EVC, LCEVC, WTF?’, ‘VVC Standard on the Final Stretch’, and AV1/VVC Update.

No Registration Necessary!

Watch now!
Speakers

	Ben Schwarz Communication Working Group Chair, Ultra HD Forum
	Ralf Schaefer VP Standards R&I InterDigital Inc.
	Yvonne Thomas Strategic Technologist DTG (Digital TV Group)
	Sassan Pejhan VP Technology, ATEME

Video: Lessons learned from streaming the World Cup live in UHD with HDR

Posted on 8th November 2018 by Russell Trafford-Jones

A step by walk through fuboTV’s FIFA World Cup streaming system. Delivering to FOX, Billy Romero and Thomas Symborski explain the challenges and the successes streaming from Russia to the US in UHD HDR.

This talk from Demuxed 2018 shows examples of how social media can help get reports back of problems and the real life usage stats. Billy and Thomas explain their system from commissioning through vendor choice and all the way to CMAF delivery.

A refreshingly transparent talk which is well worth watching!

Speakers