DVB-3DTV Specification Published

On February 17 the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) Steering Board approved the DVB-3DTV specification, which has been published as BlueBook A154 "Frame Compatible Plano-Stereoscopic 3DTV".

Plano-stereoscopic imaging systems deliver two images (left and right) that are arranged to be seen simultaneously, or near simultaneously, by the left and right eyes. Viewers perceive increased depth in the picture, which becomes more like the natural binocular viewing experience.

The DVB-3DTV specification also provides a mechanism that allows subtitles and other onscreen graphics to be best positioned so that they can be viewed correctly in the stereoscopic picture.

Following the recent approval and publication of the DVB-3DTV specification, a free EBU Technical Webinar will be held on April 14th with David Wood, live from the NAB Convention in Las Vegas, and Yvonne Thomas, live from the EBU Headquarters in Geneva. You can register and join the 3DTV Webinar from the website of EBU Technical.


Source: DVB press release and DVB news.

H.264/AVC vs. VP8: another view

The EBU BroadThinking event has been held in Geneva (CH), between 29 and 30 March. This year we have contributed to the session "What are tomorrow's web tools?" with a presentation entitled "H.264/AVC and VP8 performance analysis for consumer videoconference applications", as you can find here. The slides are available for download from here in pdf format, but only for the people registered on the EBU website.

Update (Apr.13th): the presentation is now available through Slideshare.

Let me copy&paste the abstract here for your convenience:

In this contribution we compare the performance of H.264/AVC and VP8 video coding formats for consumer videoconference applications for mobile or consumer terminals. For the H.264/AVC format we chose the popular x264 open source implementation of the standard, whereas for VP8 we used the libvpx software model that Google open sourced to the web community in May 2010. Since videoconference is strictly a low-delay application, both encoders were similarly configured avoiding backward temporal prediction that would introduce a structural delay in the encoding-decoding chain, and they were also set in constant bit-rate mode, using single-pass bit-rate control with target bit-rates between 512 kb/s and 8 Mb/s, constraining the allowed delay between 125 ms and 500 ms by properly limiting the maximum output buffer capacity.

Our test bed was not limited to evaluating video compression only, as in fact we considered the full video processing chain, including image acquisition. For this purpose we used a proprietary analytical model of a typical CMOS sensor, introducing the corresponding distortion and noise to 7 standard test sequences at 1280x720 spatial resolution. The sequences were then fed as input to the two software encoders, and then the decoded pictures were compared to the noisy source signals considering both PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) and SSIM (Structural Similarity) measured on the luminance component. The simulation results demonstrated that the H.264/AVC and VP8 encoders have very similar performance: libvpx resulted somewhat better than x264 in term of PSNR (+0.16 dB on average) and very slightly worse in terms of SSIM (-0.005 on average). 

We would also like to compare the commercial implications of the two codecs, (royalties vs. Open source), and public visibility on reciprocal road mapping.

EBU technical review 2009-Q2

The new EBU Technical Review 2009-Q2 is available. The articles in this edition are:

• Editorial : Innovation - a core activity of public service media organizations
• DAB+ ... the Australian experience
• Implementing receiver profiles - the evolution of modules for digital radio
• TV displays - a progress report
• Display measurement - a simple approach to small-area luminance uniformity testing
• Why broadcasters should care about home networking

EBU Best of 2008

EBU Technical Review has just published the "Best of 2008" edition, containing six of the best articles from 2008:

• "Evolution of the BBC iPlayer", by Anthony Rose (Controller, Vision and Online Media Group, BBC)
  
  
• "Open source Handhelds – a broadcaster-led innovation for BTH services", by François Lefebvre (Project Leader), Jean-Michel Bouffard and Pascal Charest (Communications Research Centre, Canada)
  
  
• "SVC – a highly-scalable version of H.264/AVC", by Adi Kouadio (EBU Technical); Maryline Clare and Ludovic Noblet (Orange Labs, France Telecom R&D); Vincent Bottreau (Thomson Corporate Research)
  
  
• "HDTV production codec test", by Massimo Visca (RAI) and Hans Hoffmann (EBU Technical), EBU Project Group P/HDTP
  
  
• "EBU P2P media portal", by Franc Kozamernik (EBU Technical)
  
  
• "Streaming audio contributions over IP – a new EBU standard", by Lars Jonsson (Swedish Radio) and Mathias Coinchon (EBU Technical)

EBU technical review 2008-Q4

The new edition of the quarterly EBU technical review is available at a new location and includes the following articles:

• Editorial : Downturns, upturns and media development
• Evolution of the BBC iPlayer
• Open source handhelds - a broadcaster-led innovation for BTH services
• Mobile TV standards: DVB-T vs. DVB-H
• DSO - the Swedish experience

EBU technical review 2008-Q3

The new edition of the quarterly EBU technical review is available at this page and includes the following articles:

• "Unique Digital Radio" for Europe (Editorial)
• Technical trial of the EBU P2P media portal
• MIRO — open and decentralized internet TV
• HDTV production codec tests
• Dolby Pulse — combining the merits of Dolby Digital and HE-AAC
• DTV transmitter power efficiency – new opportunities for reducing costs and environmental impact