3D HD STB SoC Solution

Broadcom Corporation announced and is sampling a new dual high definition (HD) set-top box (STB) system-on-a-chip (SoC) video gateway solution with more than two times the performance over previous generations.

The BCM7422 is the industry's first SoC to combine a 1.3 GHz multi-threaded MIPS® processor with the latest transmission efficient H.264/MPEG Scalable Video Coding (SVC), and Multiview Video Coding(MVC) standards for enabling 1080p60/50 content distribution and full-resolution HD 3DTV.

Complementing this new level of application software and visual performance is a 1G pixel per second OpenGL® ES 2.0 3D GPU for advanced 3D graphics acceleration, as well as integrated whole-home connectivity functionality including MoCA® and DLNA® support.

Source: press release.

Microsoft and Polycom join forces with SVC

Microsoft is among the first companies to announce its intention to adopt Polycom's H.264 SVC technology, furthering the recently announced strategic relationship between the two companies to deliver and market integrated Unified Communications (UC) solutions.

"Microsoft and Polycom are committed to support open, interoperable UC solutions," said Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president, Office Business Productivity Marketing Group, Microsoft. "Video collaboration can help improve customer productivity and lower costs. By integrating H.264 SVC technology within our broader solution offering, Microsoft and Polycom can make it easier for millions of people to leverage video communications within familiar Microsoft applications."

Read the press release and watch the video.

New MVC/SVC broadcast encoder

Allegro DVT announces its new AL8000 broadcast encoder, packed with new features for H.264/MVC and H.264/SVC applications. The AL8000 complies with AVC high profile at level 4.2, SVC scalable high profile at level 4.2 and MVC stereo high profile at level 4.1. Three use cases are forecasted: H.264/SVC for 2D, H.264/SVC for 3D and H.264/MVC for 3D.

More information at http://www.allegrodvt.com/news.php.

Scalable Video Coding for Windows 7

«Recent shipments of Windows 7 for business, comprised almost entirely of multi-core systems, showcase Nefsis scalable video conferencing capabilities for business applications. Nefsis delivers high-quality HD video to Windows 7 desktops by expanding video scalability in three ways: across its worldwide server cloud; across multiple processing cores at each participant's personal computer; and through the use of Scalable Video Coding. With this technology advance virtually any business can enjoy high quality video conferencing that was once the exclusive domain of expensive boardroom installations.»

Source: Nefsis News.

SVC implications for videoconference

«Frost & Sullivan believes that SVC is a key milestone in achieving higher quality video at lower network and infrastructure costs, addressing two of the key roadblocks for more pervasive videoconferencing adoption - cost and quality. We believe that even vendors with popular proprietary CODECs will be forced to give SVC its due diligence as it is standards-based and offers undisputable advantages to end users.»

Source: Frost&Sullivan

Radvision selects Freescale for HD Videoconference

Freescale Semiconductor’s high-performance MSC8144 multicore digital signal processor (DSP) has been selected by Radvision for use in its latest high-definition SCOPIA Elite 5000 Unified Communications Video Infrastructure Multiparty Conferencing Unit.

SCOPIA Elite is the industry’s first standards based MCU to natively support advanced H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) technology. RADVISION’s SVC technology provides a high quality experience over unmanaged networks such as the public Internet, particularly benefitting desktop video conferencing users on the road or teleworkers from their home offices. This approach provides the benefits of high error resiliency while maintaining full interoperability and high quality with conferencing and telepresence systems not currently using SVC.

Tuned for a myriad of wireline and wireless applications, Freescale’s MSC8144 DSP is the workhorse behind SCOPIA Elite high-definition video compression processing, enabling it with high channel density, energy efficiency and form factor advantages. The MSC8144 combines four high-performance 1 GHz DSP cores based on SC3400 StarCore™ technology with 10 MB internal memory and high-speed interconnects such as Serial RapidIO® and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.

Sources: Businesswire, Radvision.

XCode 4210

The newly launched XCode 4210 by ViXS incorporates a dual HD 1080p30 decoder that supports picture in picture and the latest H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) decoding standard for content transition to 1080p60/50 broadcasting and an additional media processing engine for flexible decoding of multiple Internet formats.

The XCode 4210 has the ability to transcrypt and transcode any multimedia content to any multimedia and container formats allowing seamless streaming, downloading and sideloading to a multitude of connected consumer entertainment devices, such as set-top box, PC/laptop, TV, game console, DLNA client, wireless tablet, consumer electronics, and wired or wireless portable or smart phone.

The XCode 4210 delivers user performance in excess of 3,200 DMIPS distributed over a main MIPS 74k applications processor and two ARC 750D offload processors, all simultaneously running their own real time operating systems. This level of performance has set a new benchmark in application and communications processing with the highest sustained networked data throughput over 400 Mbit/s in a single chipset.

See the press release.

SeaWell Networks

SeaWell Networks Inc. is a provider of Internet video delivery products designed for use by content producers and their content delivery partner organizations. SeaWell leverages video compression standard, H.264 scalable video coding (SVC), to uniquely create and deliver a high-quality viewing experience online while significantly reducing the cost of delivery.

“SeaWell’s technology is a game-changing innovation that allows video providers to create Internet-ready video content and deliver it to any screen or device in HD quality full-screen resolution or in lower resolutions for low bandwidth mobile devices,” said Northwater Vice President and current SeaWell director, Andrew Harrison. “SeaWell will create a superior experience for the viewer on a platform that is more flexible and infinitely more scalable.”

For more information see www.seawellnetworks.com.

Full SVC with interoperability in 2010

Polycom announced that it will deliver the industry's first "Full Scalable Video Coding" (Full SVC) solution in 2010, which will further address reduced bandwidth requirements, error concealment during packet loss, enhanced scalability for multipoint calling and universality - or interoperability across a broad set of video protocols.

According to Polycom, today's limited SVC solutions attempt to address these issues, but lack standards-based signaling, which precludes interoperability with any other SVC-based systems, and, more importantly, lack interoperability with all standards-based telepresence systems, desktop video collaboration applications and legacy video conferencing endpoints.

Polycom intends to deliver the first Full SVC solution that addresses all of these issues and provides unmatched interoperability. With Full SVC deployed across video endpoints and infrastructure, Polycom will extend the benefits of SVC universally, allowing modern video systems from across multiple standards to fully interoperate with SVC systems, legacy systems, H.264 systems, Microsoft RTV systems, etc.

See the full press release.

Videoconference on a Smartphone

During his keynote presentation at CES 2010, focused on the future of computing, Intel's CEO Paul Otellini showed how advances in processor technologies would make it possible to run even the most demanding applications on smaller devices.

To achieve the demonstration, Intel partnered with Vidyo, a provider of high-definition video conferencing software that uses a multipoint architecture based on the Scalable Video Coding extension to the H.264/AVC standard running on the next generation Moorestown implementation of Intel's Atom processors. Moorestown is a system on a chip that incorporates a next-generation 45-nanometer Atom processor.

All CES keynotes videos are available here.

Disruptive impact of SVC on videoconference

In the report "H.264 SVC: A Technical Assessment" Wainhouse Research compares SVC (Scalable Video Coding) to the H.264 Baseline Profile used in traditional video-conferencing systems and conclude that SVC videoconferencing systems can:

• Provide the ability to host video calls on lower cost, loss-prone IP networks, including the Internet, with equal or better quality than that of traditional systems

• Support video calls between endpoints with widely varying processor power and network connection
  
  
• Deliver much improved interactivity due to noticeable shorter delays on both point-to-point calls and multipoint calls between H.264 SVC-compliant systems
  
  
• Support an impressive reduction in the cost of multipoint infrastructure hardware

Source: Marketwire.

H.264 (03/2009)

ITU-T Rec. H.264 version (03/2009) is now in force and freely available here.

This revision contains enhancement extensions to support multiview video coding (MVC), specification of a "Constrained Baseline Profile", and some miscellaneous corrections and clarifications.

ATSC approves mobile DTV

The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) announced the approval of A/153 Mobile DTV Standard, which defines the technical specifications necessary for broadcasters to provide new services to mobile and handheld devices using digital television (DTV) transmissions.

ATSC Mobile DTV was developed to support a variety of services including free (advertiser-supported) television and interactive services delivered in real-time, subscription-based TV, and file-based content download for playback at a later time. The standard can also be used for transmission of new data broadcasting services.

ATSC Mobile DTV is built around a highly robust transmission system based on Vestigial Side Band (VSB) modulation, with enhanced error correction and other techniques to improve robustness and reduce power consumption in portable receivers, coupled with a flexible and extensible Internet Protocol (IP) based transport system, efficient MPEG AVC (ISO/IEC 14496-10 or ITU H.264) video, and HE AAC v2 audio (ISO/IEC 14496-3) coding. ATSC Mobile DTV services are carried in existing digital broadcast channels along with current DTV services without any adverse impact on legacy receiving equipment.

The draft version of A/153 specifications is available here. Note that Part 7 "Video System Characteristics" (pdf) includes the ITU-T/MPEG Scalable Video Coding technology.

Read the full press release.

SVC and MVC transcoder from ViXS

ViXS Systems Inc. announced the new High Performance Single & Dual HD Transcoder/Encoder XCode 4100 Network Media Processor family. This family of media processors is the only single chip on the market having the ability to transcode two HD 1080i60 or two 1080p30 video streams simultaneously in real-time.

The transcoder engine also supports full 1080p60 MPEG-2, H.264 or VC-1 to 1080p60 MPEG-2 or H.264 transcoding. In addition the engine can support Scalable Video Coding (SVC) and Multi-view Video Coding (MVC) formats, providing product upgradability to work with the upcoming 1080p60 broadcasts and 3DTV stereoscopic broadcasts.

See the press release.

SVC honored by IEEE

The prestigious journal IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology awarded Heiko Schwarz, Detlev Marpe and Thomas Wiegand, of Fraunhofer HHI and the TU Berlin, the Best Paper Award for the most outstanding paper of the past two years in recognition of the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension of the H.264/AVC video coding standard.

The jury made special mention of the fact that the scientific work of the researchers was not merely documented in published papers but already in use by such leading companies as Cisco, Google and Hitachi.

The paper "Overview of the Scalable Video Coding Extension of the H.264/AVC Standard" is available here.

GIPS announces H.264 SVC integration

Global IP Solutions, a leading provider of IP multimedia processing solutions, announced support for a Scalable Video Coding (SVC) implementation integrated inside GIPS video engines, which allows incredible video quality using the minimal bandwidth by adapting to each user's available capacity.

Using GIPS VideoEngine products with H.264 SVC, multi-party video conferencing can now allow different users to take part according to their bandwidth without downgrading any other participant's experience. In addition peer-to-peer video calls have greatly improved error resilience.

VideoCall MyPresence

MyPresence is a desktop conferencing service that provides for high-quality, low-latency, highly resilient, broad-based deployments over general-purpose networks.

MyPresence is built on technology designed to take advantage of Scalable Video Coding (SVC), which is the key to proving high quality, highly reliable and highly scalable videoconferencing over public and converged IP networks.

Client software encodes SD (up to 30 FPS) and decodes up to HD (up to 30 FPS) on an Intel Core 2 Duo and is currently available from less than £5 per user per week.

MyPresence is powered by Vidyo.

Radvision brings SVC to conferencing

Radvision announced plans for the implementation of scalable video coding technology based on H.264 SVC to its SCOPIA conferencing platform during 2009.

SVC technology allows video conferencing devices to send and receive multi-layered video streams composed of a small base layer and optional additional layers that enhance resolution, frame rate and quality. The layering capability of scalable coding provides a dramatically higher degree of error resiliency and video quality than can be provided by conventional video coding without a significant increase in bandwidth requirements. Additionally, a single multi-layer SVC video stream can support a broad range of devices and networks.

Go to this page for further details and to see an online interactive demo of the superior error resiliency provided by SVC.

Vanguard showcases SVC IP

Vanguard Software Solutions, Inc., an established video coding supplier, will showcase its latest H.264 technology at NAB 2009 trade show in Las Vegas, NV. Included are: support for Panasonic AVC-Intra and H.264 CABAC IP Cores for FPGA and custom ASICs; Real-Time AVC TRANSCODING required in Internet/Web Video Casting and H.264 SVC support required in video communications markets.

“H.264 SVC is fast becoming a requirement in video communication products and is likely to be adopted by broadcasters in the near future. VSOFTS is ready to provide SVC enabled solutions for x86 and many embedded systems” said VSOFTS President, Irena Terterov.

ESA conducting studies on SVC

The Telecommunications and Integrated Applications (TIA) directorate of the European Space Agency (ESA) is conducting a 12-months study on “Scalable Video Coding Applications and Technologies for mobile satellite based hybrid networks”.

The activity shall investigate the viability of integrating Scalable Video Coding (SVC) technologies over DVB-SH networks and disseminate its findings to relevant fora (e.g. DVB TM–SSP, DVB TM–CBMS, or DVB TM–AVC). Partners of the project are Nomor Research GmbH, Fraunhofer HHI, Fraunhofer IIS and Eutelsat S.A.

The individual study objectives may be summarized as follows:

• To gain insight on the benefits of state-of-the-art Scalable Video Coding (SVC), in a Mobile TV context,
• To analyze the DVB-SH specifications with regards to supporting SVC,
• To provide methods for estimating the gains offered by SVC with respect to H.264/AVC,
• To verify these methods by way of system simulations (to be set-up in the study) of selected DVB-SH use cases (to be identified in the study),
• To benchmark DVB-SH against other bearer technologies for Mobile TV that exploit SVC-based or non-SVC-based scalable video coding schemes, using public descriptions/results available for these other bearer technologies,
• If necessary, to influence the SVC standardisation process in DVB (TM-AVC), in coordination with other stakeholders within and outside TM-SSP,
• To provide recommendation for future work, using the tools developed.

Go to the project webpage.