Streaming Tech Sweden

Video: User-Generated HDR is Still Too Hard

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

HDR and wide colour gamuts are difficult enough in professional settings – how can YouTube get it right with user-generated content?

Steven Robertson from Google explains the difficulties that YouTube has faced in dealing with HDR in both its original productions but also in terms of user generated content (UGC). These difficulties stem from the Dolby PQ way of looking at the world with fixed brightnesses and the ability to go all the way up to 10,000 nits of brightness and also from the world of wider colour gamuts with Display P3 and BT.2020 (WCG).

Viewing conditions have been a challenge right from the beginning of TV but ever more so now with screens of many different shapes and sizes being available with very varied abilities to show brightness and colour. Steven spends some time discussing the difficulty of finding a display suitable for colour grading and previewing your work on – particularly for individual users who are without a large production budget.

Interestingly, we then see that one of the biggest difficulties is in visual perception which makes colours you see after having seen bad colours look much better. HDR can deliver extremely bright and extremely wrong colours. Steven shows real examples from YouTube of where the brain has been tricked into thinking colour and brightness are correct but they clearly are not.

Whilst it’s long been known that HDR and WCG are inextricably linked with human vision, this is a great insight into tackling this at scale and the research that has gone on to bring this under automated control.

Watch now!
Free registration required

This talk is from Streaming Tech Sweden, an annual conference run by Eyevinn Technology. Videos from the event are available to paid attendees but are released free of charge after several months. As with all videos on The Broadcast Knowledge, this is available free of charge after registering on the site.

Speaker

Steven Robertson Steven Robertson
Software Engineer, YouTube Player Infrastructure
Google

Video: Deployment of Ultra HD Services Around the Globe

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

In some parts of the industry UHD is entirely absent. Thierry Fautier is here to shine a light on the progress being made around the globe in deploying UHD.

Thierry starts off by defining terms – important because Ultra HD actually hides several, often unmentioned, formats behind the term ‘UHD’. This also shows how all of the different aspects of UHD, which include colour (WCG), HDR, audio (NGA) and frame rate to name only a few, fit together.

There’s then a look at the stats, where is HDR deployed? How is UHD typically delivered? And the famed HDR Venn diagram showing which TVs support which formats.

As ever, live sports is a major testing ground so the talk examines some lessons learnt, and features a BBC case study, from the 2018 World Cup. Not unrelated, there is a discussion on the state of UHD streaming including discussion of CMAF.

Leading nicely onto Content Aware Encoding (CAE), which was also in use at the world cup.

Watch now!
Free registration required

Speaker

Thierry Fautier Thierry Fautier
President-Chair, Ultra HD Forum
VP Video Strategy, Harmonic

Video: Blockchain-based Distributed Transcoding Model

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

It’s all very well talking about ‘blockchain’ but where’s the use case? This working transcoding and distribution platform is one example and LivePeer’s Philipp Angele steps onto the stage to explain how they have created this platform as a service using the under-utilised video encoding capability of GPUs used in crypto currency mining.

Whilst there is a lot of hype around blockchain, the fact remains that many blockchains are in constant use throughout the world and, unrelated to any currency aspect, they have a robust way of solving certain problems – the main one being ensuring exchanges of data are completed fairly and without any fraud. This can be applied to distribution of content as much as it can be to ‘smart contracts’ which, Philipp explains are like legal contracts in as much as they are a promise to do certain things. They are ‘smart’, because the blockchain network can verify that the contract has been completed.

Livepeer’s open source platform on which developers can build services works, we hear, by brokering interactions between ‘broadcasters’, ‘orchestrators’ and ‘transcoders’. Philipp details how these work together and also looks at the incentives miners have to participate by analysing their profits for different tasks.

To finish off, this talk then takes focusses on the other elements of online streaming services and examines what services are available to accomplish those tasks using distributed/blockchain technology.

Watch now!
Free registration required
This talk was given at Streaming Tech Sweden which is an annual conference from Eyvinn Technology. Streamed on their own video platform, talks are initially available exclusively to all conference attendees, but are released free-to-view during the subsequent year. Free registration is required to watch the videos.

Speaker

Phillip Angele Philipp Angele
Head of Product,
Livepeer

Video: How Video is Affected by Human Physiology

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

How can we make video more appealing to humans? We’ve evolved to live a certain way and this has defined – and will continue to define – our video technologies. MUX founder Jon Dahl talks to us here about the ways in which human physiology drives viewing habits.

Vertical vs. horizontal video, angular resolution and how the typical viewing distances of computers, TVs and other devices affects what resolution we can perceive are all discussed. Jon moves on to frequencies both of audio and video where frame rates and flicker are important and where physics comes into play alongside biology.

Even for the experienced, this talk is bound to bring something new and is a great tour of the fundamentals of the visual perception that our industry relies on and strives to please day in, day out.

Watch now!
Free registration required

This talk was given at Streaming Tech Sweden which is an annual conference from Eyvinn Technology. Streamed on their own video platform, talks are initially available exclusively to all conference attendees, but are released free-to-view during the subsequent year. Free registration is required to watch the videos.

Speaker

John Dahl John Dahl
Founder,
MUX