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MillimeterMark In
Jun 1, 2008 12:00 PM
Need to Distribute? Compress Wisely
By Dan Ochiva
Anyone involved in production today can probably name any number of compression formats (codecs) and the vendors that support them — think Panasonic DVCPRO and AVCHD or Thomson Grass Valley's implementation of JPEG 2000.
But with the constant increase in new distribution possibilities — IPTV, the Web, cell phones — most of us admit to a little confusion, whether about choosing an encoding device or settling on the best format for a particular audience.
There's no confusion, however, in how quickly viewers seem to be moving to a new generation of distribution schemes such as online video. This past March, for example, Reston, Va.-based research group comScore reported that U.S. Internet users viewed 11.5 billion online videos that month, representing a 13-percent gain versus February 2008 and a 64-percent gain versus March 2007.
New companies now offer capabilities few thought possible for streaming HD video over the Internet. In May, Milpitas, Calif.-based Vusion (www.vusion.com) made its official debut at the Digital Hollywood conference with the claim that it would be the first company with the capability to deliver “true 720p HD-quality video” to 95 percent of all broadband consumers. At the event, company founder and CTO Aaron Crayford said that radical changes in the way that users access and consume video content are driving both viewers and advertising revenues to rapidly shift from television to the Internet.
Meanwhile, Accenture — which claims the title as the largest consulting company in the world — announced in May that it had acquired Origin Digital, a New Jersey-based company with expertise in wrangling video for online, mobile, and IPTV video. Greg Douglass, managing director of Accenture's media and entertainment division, said that the “digital market has reached critical mass” now that bandwidth is both affordable and economical.
Understanding arcane technology such as encoding and transcoding now seems key to a producer's skill set. While software, hardware, and combined turnkey systems have all been brought to bear, new time and effort cost savings come from hardware dedicated to the task — such as DSPs — as well as gear that integrates DSP and CPUs. To this end, Texas Instruments (TI) has been touting its Da Vinci Systems digital media processor. It's a relatively inexpensive chipset that uses the latter design, combining a video processor, MPEG-4 coprocessor, and a powerful but low-power ARM CPU.
Austin-based Media Excel uses the TI device in its Hera video-transcoding product line. The latest Hera 4000 series, introduced at NAB Show 2008, is claimed to offer file transcoding up to 15X faster than realtime.
MTV Networks chose Media Excel gear; the Viacom division currently uses a number of the Hera 3200 models in its domestic facilities. Tris Baer, vice president of application development at MTV, says he likes the product's flexibility. “Media Excel has made a Swiss Army knife for high-speed transcodes,” Baer says.
Baer's concerns over the coming year include determining the best approach to handling HD file sizes and getting a handle on proliferating metadata formats. “Each provider seems to have a different way of doing [metadata],” says Baer, who has devised a large database to track the different uses. “We receive a lot of wacky stuff too; for example, something might look like it's 16×9, but actually it's SD with bars placed on the top and the bottom.”
