Mesmerizing Week
Imaging & Immersive

Feedback on UHD, HDR and NGA trials over years - moving to even more pixels

Mickael Raulet, VP innovation

In the past decade, high fidelity contents were delivered to the end user. This has started with a new video codec called HEVC born in 2013 with the aim of bringing more pixels to the end user, to this end UHD. In 2014, MPEG has standardized version 2 of HEVC which brings HDR on top of more pixels. DVB and ATSC, relying on MPEG technologies, both decided to move to more pixels and then to HDR, but having in mind that video is the most appealing feature and not necessarily enough for high immersivity. Besides Video we have audio and new codecs pop-up namely Dolby AC-4 and MPEG-H 3D audio also both called “Next generation audio (NGA)”. With those codecs, you can keep the ambiance of the stadium, add various commentaries as objects, increase the sound of the commentary inside the ambiance of vice et versa or completely remove the objects. We will provide various live use cases trials of the famous French open tournaments involving HEVC, HDR or NGA.

In the meantime, 8K-TV momentum has grown these past years, fostered by CE-display manufacturers and perspective of Tokyo’s Olympics broadcasting. However, a broad 8K-TV deployment is still uncertain. Although HEVC provides sufficient coding efficiency to enable DTH broadcasting, the transmission cost remains high and the HEVC licensing situation makes deployment complicated, especially for DTT. In that context, the emerging codecs VVC and EVC are both capable of addressing these issues by increasing coding efficiency without repeating HEVC licensing situation. In this paper, we demonstrate how VVC and EVC could be 8K-broadcast enablers in the upcoming years. Based on encoding constraints coming from DVB-T2/S2 and 5G-broadcast transmission scenarios, the relevance of both codecs is assessed based on encoding efficiency and complexity criterions. In addition, we highlight that early 8K-deployment is possible with these codecs since a reduced set of tools is capable of achieving minimal required efficiency. Finally, some preliminary results of ATEME industrial VVC encoding platform are provided to show that early 8K deployment is possible using the latest video coding standards.